Easter present: a pattern generator for everyone

My husband made something amazing for the eggers again!
He programmed a pattern generator that enables you to create triangle or square-based patterns. The output is an svg file that can be plotted on an egg.

Link to the generator: http://eggbot.cloudy.dyndns.org

The egg-pattern-generator has many parameters that can be set before generating the file. First you have to choose whether you want triangles or squares, then you can specify the size and number of the rows, if you want to have the shapes random sized or not. And many more tiny modifications... Have a look and create your own pattern!

I made a few eggs based on the generated designs:

Small squares

You don't have to print all the layers

Vivid colors look great

Large squares

And of course many more can be and will be made... :)

New designs on Thingiverse

During last weekend I printed sooo many eggs for Easter and finally finished some of my half-made designs.

I published three more designs on Thingiverse (links are under the pictures):

Flower pattern

Panda made for a friend

Wild flowers inspired by a napkin

Happy Easter egg making for everyone! :)

Various prints and a strange pen behaviour

Some more prints from a couple of days ago. They look very good, I only discovered a few slight problems with them. 

Design from Thingiverse

The 3D cubes one is not perfect, but you can still see the 3D in it. 

Design from Thingiverse

I made these 2 eggs just as an example that how easy is to make a new printable design in Inkscape. I used my Google men file (now uploaded to Thingiverse) and the Hershey text extension.

During the printing of the 3D cubes I discovered a new anomaly. My ultra fine Sharpie pen became thicker by the end of the printing. Have you ever experienced anything similar?

Drawing and first printing of the flower pattern

I started drawing this pattern a few weeks ago, but haven't had time to finish it lately. Today I sat down to do last lines and add fillings to the lines.

What I first realised was that I forgot how to do the filling, so I opened the EggBot Wiki tutorial I used earlier.

What I also realised was that I forgot to write about the trick I invented to make the filling and the outline match more. If after you duplicate your path you go to Path → Inset for one or two times, the filling will not cross the outline and it will look better on printing.

Once I finished, let's the printing begin!

However I put every unique pattern to a different layer, first I tried to print it with only one colour. I wanted to test the whole drawing without making any mistake in the pen changing process.

As you can see the filling is not inside the outline for some reasons. I have had the same bug with my Google Men drawing, but I haven't spent time so far to examine it. To be honest I thought I did something wrong when I changed the different pens, but in this case it happened with the first layer without any pen changes.
I decided to try Extensions → EggBot → Reorder Paths for Speed.

version 1

After the optimisation the second try looked much better! At least for the leaves... :( I'm still not sure if this setting solved the problem, probably not, but now I didn't experience the same problem, I found new ones!

Filling is not perfect

Lines are not perfectly in line

I should place the pen higher

Besides my other obvious problems, the round patterns were not round at all, so I stretched the whole picture as much as I could.

version 2

The second black print looked better, stretching made its magic, round objects look almost totally round. However I still have problems with the filling. For the colour print I try to set a bit on the fillings. Who knows, I might get it right this time.

I also removed the blue flower from the left, because on the egg it was next to the pink one on the right and it did not look good. I replaced it with the orange one and kept the colour blue. Hopefully a not-filled flower will look better next to the filled pink one.

version 3

And this is how the colour print looked:

I can see that it is still not perfect, so before I publish the .svg file on my Thingiverse page I will work a bit more on it.

Thanks to my grandparents for providing eggs to experiment!

My Thingiverse page

I started my Thingiverse page to share my designs. At the moment I only have the Hungarian folk pattern there, but as soon as I finish more and I can print them (more or less) flawless, I will upload them.

Visit my page for designs: http://www.thingiverse.com/k1ttk4/designs

My first design

My first design was inspired by my Mom. I told her about my plans to draw something in Inkscape to be printed on an egg later. She immediately ask if I am planning to do a Hungarian folk pattern. Hmmm, why not?

So I opened a browser to search for some inspiration and then draw my first pattern. To be exact, only the outline in black and white as I was not sure how to do the filling. I searched the EggBot wiki about a tutorial and soon found the "Drawing a smiley face" tutorial.

After a few hours of work I felt like trying it out for real. I went to the fridge to get an egg, set up the printer and mounted the egg. What can I say, nothing can be perfect for the first try:

Drawing v1 in Inkscape

Egg printed with v1

The pattern was too small and stretched. Also most parts of the egg were empty and that looked bad. What went well was the filling. But actually it went far too well as the pen went through the same places too many times. In the tutorial I was advised to use 4px for the stroke, but I increased it for the next print to 5px and it seemed to be the right choice with my Ultra Fine Sharpie pens.

I also edited the drawing, stretched it to look more natural on the egg and to make it bigger. I also added few patterns to the top and the bottom. I must say that the result was much better!

Drawing v2 in Inkscape

Egg printed with v2

I have some problems with placing the pen to low and because of that it makes extra unwanted lines at the "edges". But other than this, I like how it worked out!

EggBot software for Inkscape

I don't plan to say much about the software install as it was easy and smooth. I followed the instructions from the EggBot website and everything went as promised.

I also tested the Inkscape extension on both Windows and OSX and they worked perfectly.