Ostrich Egg Lamp
To make some holes in an egg doesn’t sound too hard – but surprisingly an ostrich egg is a lot more robust than you’d expect.
It is an “interesting” material to work with. The calcified eggshell is about 3mm thick. It is very hard, astonishingly stable and it has a nice polished surface with small indents. When cutting the egg it smells somewhat disgusting – a bit like burned bone.
For the workmanship we used a generic rotary tool (aka Dremel) with several grinding attachments
- drill bits
- pedikure/manikure sanding sleves + holder
the bits are really fast to change and dirt cheap - diamond cutting wheel
these made for fast progress
It took some time to find the right tools. If you want to do more elaborate ostrich egg art the right tool would probably be a dentist tool. We’ll give that a try on the next egg. Maybe in conjunction with water cooling even the smell can be avoided…
To light up the egg we milled an aluminium base (top and bottom are clear acrylic) on a CNC mill and put a mini Wifi computer (ESP8266 on a witty cloud pcb) in it. We added a ws2812 rgb led to it and now our Ostrichegg lamp can be controlled through an interactive inteface that is hosted on the mini computer in the base. You can select the colour and brightness from any smartphone or computer connected to our home wifi.
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