This is really quite interesting and similar to a project I'm working on. I've been using procedural generation to generate a marble dexterity track similar to a Perplexus. My tools are mainly Python, the Build123D library and a 3D printer.
Marble Fountain
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Re: Marble Fountain
#22I appreciate the work. It's really beautiful and checks so many of my "oddly satisfying" boxes as a builder. It seems it hit those for you too, obviously.
Separately, the timing of seeing this is uncanny. I've been using marble runs to explain probability to my kids and was filming a marble run conversion lesson. Seeing this at the top of HN felt like someone was reading my minds.
Re: Marble Fountain
#23I would pay silly money for one of those things on my desk
Re: Marble Fountain
#24Is it printed / sintered in metal?
Re: Marble Fountain
#25I wonder if you could get it to run silently, or close to it.
Re: Marble Fountain
#26Is the banking of the curve for a specific velocity?
It says that the banking is intentionally excessive.
Re: Marble Fountain
#27Beautiful, I wonder what kind of craziness would be possible with this, at scale. Whole buildings being printed and assembled block by block. Real life Minecraft, if you will
Blame! is a manga where in the future humans have robots that build, and are controlled by people with Net Terminal Genes. Something happens and those humans die leaving the robots building non-stop procedurally for eons. By the time our protagonist moves about in the world, its said the Megastructure reaches from Earth all the way to Jupiter.
Also, the movie Fracture features these cool marble machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-v6E9H6nh0
Back when movies were made with unique good scripts and not marvel slop.
Re: Marble Fountain
#28Beautiful, I wonder what kind of craziness would be possible with this, at scale. Whole buildings being printed and assembled block by block. Real life Minecraft, if you will
There are serious efforts and working prototypes of printing houses. This works surprisingly well, allows construction in days instead of months, and shows a lot of promise. It’s a great rabbit hole to fall into!
Re: Marble Fountain
#29Designers of marble fountains who don't use computing to design the paths run into reliability issues: sometimes balls derailing out of their track. They have to observe the contraption, identify problems (balls getting jammed up or jumping out) and then guess at the root causes and make manual adjustments.
That's the thing here: he has it running for hours presumably without any ball jumping out.
Most of the tracks consist of two rails, so the ball has two contact points. I'm no physicist but it seems like the goal would be to have ideally nearly equal forces at the two contact points at all times during the ball's descent. In other words, the track has to be perfectly banked so that the gravity and centripetal acceleration vector are balanced by a normal vector perpendicular to the rails. During a derailment, the ball has to lift away from one of the two contact points, so the normal force must have dropped to zero.
Re: Marble Fountain
#30Maybe it’s the color and this would look better in a brighter shade, but I hate it. It looks wrong. Malignant.