Automate Your Egg Painting with This Ovoid Plotter

Easter looms and you haven’t even begun to prepare yourself for the ordeal of decorating eggs with your kids, have you? Your dining room table is surely doomed. But you still have time to save it by building something like Sir Reginald Hatchington III’s Automatic Ovoid Scrivener.

There is actually a long tradition in the maker community of building egg plotters. That started with Bruce Shapiro’s first EggBot design more than 35 years ago. And in the decades since, the whimsical and quirky concept has continued to bring smiles to faces every Easter. The Automatic Ovoid Scrivener carries on that legacy and is the work of the kids behind GurgleApps, which is a family-owned business and YouTube channel dedicated to fun projects.

While the Automatic Ovoid Scrivener was heavily inspired by the EggBot, it is a custom design created from the ground up for maximum silliness. Like all machines of this kind, it is a two-axis CNC plotter. One axis rotates the entire egg, while the other moves the pen or marker over the egg’s surface. But uniquely, the second axis on the Automatic Ovoid Scrivener is also rotary, rather than linear. That lets it move in an arc that more closely matches the shape of the egg. A servo-actuated lifting mechanism touches the drawing implement to the shell.

The motors move under the control of an Arduino Leonardo board and GurgleApps even built a very comprehensive web interface for creating the graphics to plot. That is pretty sophisticated and is genuinely impressive, even if the Automatic Ovoid Scrivener is somewhat tongue-in-cheek overall.

That cheekiness is most apparent in the frame design. It is constructed of laser-cut wood, with engraved graphics reminiscent of Victorian-era patent medicines. As you might expect, many eggscellent puns are present.

GurgleApps hasn’t released the Automatic Ovoid Scrivener as a kit yet, but you can certainly still use it for inspiration as you scramble to entertain your kids this Sunday.