To celebrate the arrival of spring, Kristal had a wonderful idea to build a LEGO egg that could hatch. She designed it so that a cute little chick breaks out of the top of the egg when you turn a knob on the side. Of course, I just had to motorize it, and built a nest containing three of them that can wiggle the eggs and open them all. I explain how it all works in the video, and you can find instructions for building the basic egg, along with more information below.
One thing to note if you build your own is that if you push the front of the egg in really tight, the beak of the chick can get caught on the inside. You may have to loosen up the connection, or pull it out just a bit if that happens to ensure the head can move up and down freely.
I’ve also designed the control knob so that it can be easily removed and replaced with a 1×1 plate, to ‘hide’ the mechanism. But, depending on the clutch power of your bricks, the 1×1 round bricks might slip. You can just replace the axle with a longer one that extends outside the egg to have a more solid control connection.
The nest was very interesting to make. It’s actually built around a Technic ring to get the semi-circle shape, and uses a combination of plates and tiles to give an intertwined effect. Most of the pieces are actually connected to each other, though there are a few that I just slid into the gaps to fill space.
I’m using 4 Power Functions M-Motors to drive all the motion. 2 for wiggling the eggs and 2 for opening and closing the eggs. This allowed me stagger the starts of the wiggling and hatching of some of the eggs for the video, instead of having them all happening at once.
