Easter eggs 2015

I already mentioned in my earlier post that I have printed many eggs in the last couple of days for Easter. Some were for friends and some for my family. I didn't want to post the pictures before Easter it might have ruined the surprise!

Here is my Easter collection for 2015:

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?

Lots of prints and the solution to my misprinting problems

Today evening my husband's friend came over to see my EggBot in action. I showed him how it is printing but as usual we have seen the filling and outline misprinting problem. Since he is a nerd too we decided to debug it finally!

Do you remember these problems I mentioned in my previous posts?

Lines are going crazy

Filling is totally out of the outline

We have done about 10-12 prints today. Most of them was for testing purposes but on the bright side I could use my new "fat" Sharpie pens because the new pen holder piece is done! My husband printed it out with his 3D printer a few days ago but we just didn't have time to test it yet. (He also promised a post about how he made it, so stay tuned!)

Test prints

First, we tried to set the shape of the egg by lifting up and down the motor. It didn't make much change. Then we tried to print out some examples to see if only my designs are bad or it happens with the other ones too. It wasn't my designs. You can see that the prints look good from the distance. But once you look closer the lines are not aligned properly, some filling is not placed right, etc.

The next idea was to create a drawing with only squares to see if they are aligned properly. They were. Then we just printed a line that went around the egg two times exactly. However the line never reached the end of the second round, it was too short.

Test printed egg

Since we didn't have much idea what can cause this problem at the end we decided to try to update the firmware from 2.0.1 to 2.1.5. And tadaaam, it solved everything!

Egg in the front before and the one at the back after the firmware update

Pink is after the firmware update, brown and bronze is before

Google man after the update

Google man after the update - still there is a tiny mistake with his left shoe

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!

Various prints

Friends came over and I wanted to show them my EggBot printer. I quickly pulled out an example drawing and after a short pen-up and pen-down setup I started printing. The result was not as good as I imagined:

As you can see the lines are not in harmony at all and it is kinda not what one would expect to happen. The main problem probably was that I had smaller eggs this time and I moved the parts of the EggBot Printer to fit smaller eggs but I didn't realise that the pen wasn't in the middle of the egg any more. Anyway, they were happy to see it actually printing.

For the second try I printed one of my half-ready designs with the Google Man (from my Gmail background) on it. And it also contains a test message printed on it that I placed there using the EggBot Inkscape extension's Hersey text.

The text worked perfectly, unfortunately it cannot handle the exotic Hungarian letters such as "ü" and "á", but I can finish it manually. Unfortunately the printing has some mistakes again. The fillings of the feet weren't placed correctly. It happened earlier too, so I will look into this more deeply in the near future and get back with a solution as soon as I tested it.

Various prints

I tried to print out this design but the lines got messed up. At the moment I don't know why but I should really test a bit more to make it perfect.

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!

My first print

After my EggBot was in one piece, of course I wanted to try it out! First, I only used the one colour, in my case it was black.

I opened a template file that I downloaded earlier in Inkscape and set up the printer, using the Inkscape EggBot extension. Once again I followed the very clear instructions and after setting up the pen-up and pen-down positions in about 3 minutes, I found myself trying to mount the egg for about 10 minutes...

I don't know if you have ever tried to mount an egg before the way that it is as symmetrical as possible, but it seems to be one of the hardest parts of using EggBot.

The website makes it seem very easy, but believe me, I was very frustrated after trying it for 10 minutes:

Pull back the plunger and roughly center the end of the egg on the headstock. Gently return the plunger to the other end of the egg. Spin the egg to see if it is centered, and adjust its position in the two egg cups as necessary.

If you have any good tips how to do it easily, please do not hesitate to share!

Anyway, at the end I managed to mount the egg and the printing could be started:

I later tried to print the snowman with 2 colours and other patterns. I also found one example file with text. Could not resist to print it too!