Background: When a hard boiled egg is spun on a table, it rotates freely since the inside is completely solid. With a raw egg, the liquid yolk sloshes around and resists rotation. By using math and physics, we can analyze the rotational oscillation of an egg and determine the yolk consistency.

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” - Jaime Hyneman

Objective: Design and build a device to determine how cooked a boiled egg is using non-invasive techniques.

Motivation: As part of our final year engineering course, we were tasked to create a mechatronics device of our choosing. This project was heavily inspired by Matthias Wandel and his boiled egg hardness tester.

Functional Requirements:

• Measure egg mass from strain gauge
• Measure oscillation from accelerometer
• Control LCD screen
• Mechanical design and fabrication
• Integration and user interaction study
• C# interface
• MATLAB data analysis

Limitations: This prototype was developed in 3 weeks during school and has approximately 80% repeatability.

Partner: Justin Liang

Sixty second demo video of the device in action.

CAD model of electronics inside the enclosure (transparency shown for clarity)

PCB diagram.

PCB assembled.

Dry fitting of components inside handle enclosure.

Annotated diagram of the final device.

Example data from five egg-jiggling trials.

The PerfEggct stored in its natural habitat.

Kitchen gadgets aren't complete without a fancy photoshoot!

Truly perf-egg-ct.

Interested in reading more about this project? Head over to Instructables for more details! And if you’re really interested, feel free to read our glorious 35-page final report [here](/files/MECH 423 Final Project Report.pdf).