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I wonder if you could get it to run silently, or close to it.
Is it printed / sintered in metal?
I wish there was a write up of how some of the code works. There's a lot of Python in the repo. Looks fascinating, seems to use Python to generate OpenSCAD code, I think.
Designers 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…
Also to be fair the final system does lose a ball every 30ish minutes. The tuning was largely me staring at the run or taking a video trying to catch where they get lost. Instead of hand tuning I would just update the generator and print another one. I'm considering closing the loop with a camera but that would be a whole new project.
Very cool! I've designed a lot of Hilbert Curve marble tracks, using OpenSCAD and python
This is beautiful. It would be amazing to have the tracks encode/decode audio, you know? Like, the track of the marble can be used to generate different frequencies...
Mesmerizing and beautiful in a simple way, I really like this type of thing.
I think there is an instinct built deep in our lizard brain somewhere for this. Humans will happily stare at a fire, or an ocean, or a wave in a river, or (sometimes, especially children) a TV screen - and all I have worked out why is because it is constantly changing in an unpredictable way.
This marble run shouldn't even be unpredictable - clearly the paths are fixed and the cadence of balls is regular - but somehow it is still mesmerizing.