71–80 of 97 posts
Very cool! I've designed a lot of Hilbert Curve marble tracks, using OpenSCAD and python
That sounds super interesting, do you have a link?
Very cool! I've designed a lot of Hilbert Curve marble tracks, using OpenSCAD and python
It gives everything a uniform look while allowing to fill the space in a different way.
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...
I actually attempted this, the idea of a python script that converts a midi track into a marble run is just too good to not try. I printed a large drum with different track structures inside so I could test various "slopes" by changing the speed and it just doesn't work, the balls bounce around too much to get an audible pitch. A less rigid material or a larger bearing would likely work better but I decided to focus…
Maybe at the bottom your marbles could land on surfaces with different accustic properties. Track selection would determine the surface and release time would determine the timing.
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.
It's specifically using SolidPython2 to generate the models. I originally wanted to do a quick code cleanup and have the specific math be much clearer but by the time it was working that was an absolutely massive undertaking. If I touch the code again I'm probably going to refactor the entire codebase and use a different 3D engine.
I am also procedurally generating marble tracks and 3D printing them for about a year now and found that library very useful.
The community is very active and its very similar to features we know from Fusion360/SolidWorks but all in code.
The particle simulation approach to generating an organic "tree-like" support structure is super creative! If I'm understanding correctly, you defined some laws of physics and then ran a simulation with the "time" dimension mapped to the z-axis? Is this a well-known approach, or something you came up with? Either way, it produces a beautiful aesthetic. I'd love to play around with this idea.
That's pretty much it! It's the simplest method of supports I could come up with that allows for robust keepout zones. I did have a bunch of issues at first with supports blocking the path but with a little tuning it became surprisingly consistent. I doubt I'm the first to come up with it but I have not seen any similar systems. Thank you! The emergent forms are much more interesting than they have any right to be fo…
hehe I wonder if this is how evolution in nature "comes up with" beauty :-D
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…
Doesn't make the whole thing less remarkable.
This is a great example of a good use case for 3D printers. The smooth marble run action combined with the interwoven organic forms would be a huge PITA to fabricate with any other method I can think of, even if your just making one.
A good use case for 3D printers is random, small, custom household items that greatly increase my quality of life, much more than it is a unique sculpture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually much weirder than that: banking changes the axis of rotation and thus kills the rotational inertia. The tracks bank super aggressively in order to prevent the ball from accelerating too much and hopping the track. This is part of why the descent is so smooth and all the balls move at more or less the same speed. Also to be fair the final system does lose a ball every 30ish minutes. The tuning was largel…
Does the temperature of the track change much after thirty minutes?