I'm going to experiment with fonts and lettering, but the more knowledge I have going into it the fewer sacrificial eggs I'll need. Other than "write big" are there tips you can share for producing script that looks good? ("Christmas 2010"

Is it as simple as clicking the text tool, typing a message in a sans-serif font, and scaling it up with the corner handles? Or is there a conversion / tracing step that should happen?

You need to convert it to a path with "Path->Object to Path".

For experimentation, light bulbs work great. Mate the top of the bulb with the egg motor cup and the base of the bulb with the tailstock. You can use rubbing alcohol to wipe the bulb clean and start over again.

Also, you don't necessarily need to use sans serif fonts for good results. With either large fonts or a fine nib you can still get good results. An issue you may experience though is filling in the characters. There's some pointers at the Wiki site on this topic,

http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Creating_filled_regions

The next release of the Eggbot extensions for Inkscape will also include a new tool for easy-within-Inkscape hatch filling of lots of text and other figures. However, the results are more tedious to plot than using the (poorly named) "Hatches (rough)" tool of Inkscape and described in the "Drawing a smiley face" tutorial (also at the Eggbot wiki site). The latter approach yields a single, smooth area filling back and forth curve which plots quickly. The former approach -- the new tool for hatch filling -- produces classic hatch fills which are lots of individual straight line segments. Plotting them is tedious owing to all the pen up and pen down operations as well as the time spent (by the Eggbot) repositioning the egg for each new hatch line.

Dan

Will the new tool work well on things like the letter "O", which has one circle inside the other?

Yes, it will. See, for example, thing 4943 at thingiverse.com. (I tried posting the web link, but it was considered spam.)

Dan

Or, better yet, there's now an example at the Eggbot wiki. See,

http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Hatch_fill

Dan

I just tried it out, it works great!

Thanks for the follow up: it is appreciated.

While the new hatch fill extension is currently unsupported, I'll be very curious to hear how well it seems to work or not. Every time I thought it was "finished", I'd discover some new SVG twist. A few weeks back it was SVG viewBox support which is an implicit additional transform applied to the entire drawing. (And impacted the Eggbot Control extension as well.)

Thanks,
Dan