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This adorable robot chicken turns my favorite time killer into a productivity game

This adorable robot chicken turns my favorite time killer into a productivity game

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Egg Inc. robot tapper
Egg Inc. robot tapper
Christine Sunu

A couple of weeks ago, I told you guys about my newly hatched obsession with the mobile game Egg Inc., which is a deceptively simple and uncannily addictive time occupier that demands a lot of tapping to churn out more chickens. More than a few of you picked up the habit, but one person went the extra mile by crafting her own screen-tapping robot to save her the repetitive strain injury (which, I can confirm, is a real danger with this game):

Christine Sunu pulled together some open-source software and very basic hardware components... then wrapped them up in a sock dressed up to look like a chicken. My heart was already swelling up with happy emotions, seeing Christine hack her way to a healthier lifestyle, but she didn’t just automate the Egg Inc. tapping grind — she turned it into a whole new game!

By syncing up the tapping bot with her activities on her computer, she made it so new chickens would spawn only when she was doing something productive. Go to Reddit, she points out, and there’ll be no chickens for you. And no additional chickens means you’ll struggle to churn out the trillions of eggs required to reach the nonillions of dollars needed to buy the late-game upgrades.

Final delightful topping to all of this: Christine just started her hacking tutorial website as her way of acting in the spirit of International Women’s Day, which was exactly a week ago. On that day, we wrote why it's important for girls to find role models in female scientists, and the same is very much true for female coders. The more the merrier, especially when they’re coming up with such ingenious and straightforward hacks.

Christine, I salute, congratulate, and thank you for creating this smart chicken screen tapper.