To make some holes in an\u00a0egg doesn’t sound too hard – but surprisingly an ostrich egg is a lot more robust than you’d expect.<\/p>\n
It is an “interesting” material to work with. The calcified eggshell is about 3mm thick. It is very hard, \u00a0astonishingly\u00a0stable and it has\u00a0a nice polished surface with small indents. When\u00a0cutting the egg it smells\u00a0somewhat\u00a0disgusting – a bit like\u00a0burned bone.<\/p>\n
For the workmanship we used a generic rotary tool\u00a0(aka\u00a0Dremel) with\u00a0several grinding attachments<\/p>\n
It took some time to find the\u00a0right 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\u00a0try on the next egg. \u00a0Maybe in conjunction with water cooling even the smell can be avoided…<\/p>\n
To light up\u00a0the egg we milled\u00a0an 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.<\/p>\n\n\t\t