Category Archives: CNC

CNC halftones with ASCII art

ASCII CNC 23

 

ASCII CNC 21

Recently we have seen some fantastic DIY examples of CNC image carving with traditional halftones and alternative versions with regions generated with reaction-diffusion equations. More impressively, all of this is now possible with freely available, homegrown software released by the people behind those projects (Here and here.)

Seeing these examples reminded us of another “classic” method of making halftones: ASCII art. In what follows, we walk through the process of using making CNC halftones for engraving or carving from both vintage and automatically generated ASCII art. Continue reading CNC halftones with ASCII art

Halloween Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

The Great Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Halloween Project Archive!

Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and our collection of Halloween projects continues to grow. Every fall we update it to include our latest projects for the season. In the list that follows, we’ve organized dozens of our Halloween projects into categories: costumes, pumpkins, decor and food.

Last updated: 10/2019.

Continue reading Halloween Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

A Diamond Engraving Tool for Eggbot

Driver board with pen arm

 

What is it? It’s a most useful little thing: a low-cost diamond engraving attachment for the Eggbot.

 

This turns a humble pen-plotting Eggbot into a full-on CNC-driven vibrated-tip diamond-point engraving tool, capable of light-duty marking and engraving on hard materials like glass, stone, and ceramic. Wooo!

Clear glass engraving Continue reading A Diamond Engraving Tool for Eggbot

Hershey Text: An Inkscape extension for engraving fonts

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Hershey Text is an Inkscape extension that can render a line of text in one of several stroke-based “engraving” fonts. This extension solves a persistent problem, and one which we have come across in many different contexts: How to easily create simple and readable vector representations of text.

Quick start: Download and install the EggBot extensions for Inkscape, which now include Hershey Text. Much more information follows.

Continue reading Hershey Text: An Inkscape extension for engraving fonts

Maker Faire and Eggbot on Martha Stewart Show

Egg-Bot

 

If you happen to be into TV and/or Eggbot, you might want to tune into the Martha Stewart Show on Wednesday, Oct. 20. Our collaborator, Bruce Shapiro, inventor of the Eggbot, will be on as a part of a special episode about Maker Faire which will show off some of the cool things that Martha and her colleagues discovered at Maker Faire New York. After the show is broadcast, you should be able to find photos and video from the episode here.

 

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid under cc-by-nc-nd license.

Printing on a strangely shaped egg

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One of those questions that keeps coming up about the Egg-Bot is, “Does the surface have to be perfectly smooth?” Or sometimes just, “Can you print on a golf ball?”

While we wouldn’t go so far as to say that you’ll have good luck printing on a tennis ball, it turns out that the surface doesn’t exactly have to be flat either. Golf balls certainly aren’t a challenge. And, as you can see above, you can even plot on strangely shaped “eggs,” so long as the surface is smooth enough that you can drag a marker along. Neat.

Update: We’ve posted some tips on using the Eggbot with pumpkins here.


You can find more pumpkin projects in our Halloween Project Archive.