Chicken-n-Veg

Posts Tagged ‘fun’

It has been a long while since the last update, but actually there was not too much report during that time. Certainly no gardening and not very much excitement from the hens. The poor things did have to endure weeks of sub zero temperatures and large snow falls just before Christmas. Now that the temperature has warmed up and the days are getting slightly longer they seem happier again and the number of eggs we get has started to get back to normal levels.

We will need to move their run in spring to let the grass in their current one recover a little. They do have a generous 12m x 12m space but it still got very cut up over winter. Topsoil and grass seed will be needed to repair it properly.

I did have one egg related present over Christmas – an Eggbot. This was bought in kit form from Evil Mad Scientist.  It is basically a pen plotter capable of drawing on spherical (ping pong balls, Christmas decorations, etc.) or ellipsoidal (eggs) obects. It is not really an essential item perhaps, but as someone with an electronic background and children I do see it is a fun, educational robot.

The images to be printed are drawn and printed directly from Inkscape, a popular open source (free !) drawing package. The pens used for printing can be any fine tip permanent markers. Inkscape supports layers so by using different layers for different colours and changing the pens during printing, elaborate designs can be created (look at the Eggbot Flikr Group   for photos of designs that more talented people have made). Over Christmas we had great fun decorating and personalising cheap Christmas tree baubles. The picture above shows our Eggbot printing a simple blog based design on one of our eggs and the picture below shows the finished egg.