Now that's amazing. I could really use an egg bot for drawing planetary maps onto balls for my astronomy program. It seems possible to transfer images or image outlines using software. In the case of Mars, different colored pens can represent the polar cap, land masses, dust storms, and frost. It would work for Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and the globe of Saturn too. You could probably map out the more spherical or oblate spheroid asteroids too. Sun spots could be mapped as well or how about some small Earth Moons showing the landing sites..
The Egg-Bot is driven from the program Inkscape. There's a plugin that "sends" your drawing to the robot.
Everything is vector based so if you can get your information as lines instead of bitmaps it can be sent to the 'bot. I have converted one bitmap (a color jpeg) to a black vector drawing and it didn't turn out too badly (but I had to clean up a lot of extra bits because of the pen size and the fact that I was plotting on a ping pong ball).
Different colors are handled by putting them in different layers of the drawing. You can print one layer at a time - manually changing the pens between layers. The standard pen is an ultra-fine Sharpie although others have been tested and apparently work well. I've only used the Sharpies - I found a pack of 25 different colors at Target but I will probably end up only using a few of them.
You can't plot directly on the ends of your target, obviously. Manually, you could remove and remount the ball/egg to draw on the ends if you are precise enough. It makes it a little harder to do ice caps, etc.
The Egg-Bot is driven from the program Inkscape. There's a plugin that "sends" your drawing to the robot.
Everything is vector based so if you can get your information as lines instead of bitmaps it can be sent to the 'bot. I have converted one bitmap (a color jpeg) to a black vector drawing and it didn't turn out too badly (but I had to clean up a lot of extra bits because of the pen size and the fact that I was plotting on a ping pong ball).
Different colors are handled by putting them in different layers of the drawing. You can print one layer at a time - manually changing the pens between layers. The standard pen is an ultra-fine Sharpie although others have been tested and apparently work well. I've only used the Sharpies - I found a pack of 25 different colors at Target but I will probably end up only using a few of them.
You can't plot directly on the ends of your target, obviously. Manually, you could remove and remount the ball/egg to draw on the ends if you are precise enough. It makes it a little harder to do ice caps, etc.
The exact ends may not be that important. The representation of white polar ice caps on Mars is usually drawn at the perimeters which extend down substantially from the NPC and SPC center nodes at true north and south. So it's a perimeter regressional progressional outline that's important, which comes from the annual thawing and freezing of CO2 dry ice (sublimating variations). It's nearly the same with Jupiter and Saturn, even though the caps are represented by colors and not sublimated or composed in the same way of Mars.
What I'm thinking of is putting eggbot at the focal plane of the telescope's ocular and focus in a planet whereby the projected image is perceived by CCD vision sensors, and relays and stores this visual representation and eggbot directly draws onto the ball. In essence, the ball become the film or print medium, with no intervening steps. A ping pong ball is just the right size and eggbot can be adapted to mount on the telescope's tube.
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
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http://evilmadscience.com/tinykitlist/171-egg-bot
http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Eggbot
They are pretty cool and work very well - at least on the ping pong balls that I have plotted on (haven't done eggs yet).
Everything is vector based so if you can get your information as lines instead of bitmaps it can be sent to the 'bot. I have converted one bitmap (a color jpeg) to a black vector drawing and it didn't turn out too badly (but I had to clean up a lot of extra bits because of the pen size and the fact that I was plotting on a ping pong ball).
Different colors are handled by putting them in different layers of the drawing. You can print one layer at a time - manually changing the pens between layers. The standard pen is an ultra-fine Sharpie although others have been tested and apparently work well. I've only used the Sharpies - I found a pack of 25 different colors at Target but I will probably end up only using a few of them.
You can't plot directly on the ends of your target, obviously. Manually, you could remove and remount the ball/egg to draw on the ends if you are precise enough. It makes it a little harder to do ice caps, etc.