[Snille]’s motto is “If you can’t find it, make it and share it!” and we could not agree more. We wager that you won’t find his Roball sculpture on any shopping websites, so it follows that he made, and subsequently shared his dream. The sculpture has an undeniable elegance with black brackets holding brass rails all on top of a wooden platform painted white. He estimates this project took four-hundred hours to design and build and that is easy to believe.
Our first assumption was that there must be an Arduino reading the little red button which starts a sequence. A 3D-printed robot arm grasps a cat’s eye marble and randomly places it on a starting point where it invariably rolls to its ending point. The brains are actually a Pololu Mini Maestro 12-channel servo controller. The hack is using a non-uniform marble and an analog sensor at the pickup position to randomly select the next track.
If meticulously bending brass is your idea of a good time, he also has a video of a lengthier sculpture with less automation, but it’s bent brass porn. If marbles are more your speed, you know we love [Wintergatan] and his Incredible Marble Music Machine. If that doesn’t do it for you, you can eat it.
great achievement, very nice.
i wonder if you can virtually ride the ball in the 3D cad program.
and i wonder how you get the guide rails bent so accurately.
sweet.
Thank you! I designed the whole thing in SketchUp Make so you “can” ride the track. But you have to do it manually in that case. It will not bee a “smooth” ride. ???? The brass rails are manually bent to precision. I just takes time. ????
The marble does not choose it’s own path. Don’t be silly.
It takes the Path of Least Resistance.
Seems like a great choice.
I do like this sort of thing, and this is a piece certainly not to be poo-pooed, but I like “gravitrams” better… there are multiple tracks with multiple balls and the first ball can determine what happens to the second (and so on) by traversing what can best be described as mechanical logic gates.
The gravitram at Questcon in Canberra (Australia) is a very impressive machine! I’ve sat and watched it do it’s thing for as long as I was allowed to by the wife (she looked at everything else and then got bored while I did nothing but watch this machine).
You should checkout Mark Bischof RBS:es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyHNN-EknCU He’s my no:1 source of inspiration for new RBS stuff. ????
OMG, that is phenomenal.
makes the little one in out local airport lounge seem like truly child’s play.
These guys need to get together:
https://hackaday.com/2018/01/26/amazing-mechanical-linkages-and-the-software-to-design-them/
very cool, good point. this is all basically in the Art category so, imagination is the limit. but that is some cool enabling technology.
Love it! ????
Love it! I had the “Space Warp” toy as a kid and used to spend days on end building marble rollercoasters… This got me thinking and I see good ol Ali-x has knock off versions for sale… highly entertaining for the creative mind and a bit of fun learning about physics too….
I have already bought this for my daughter: https://www.amazon.com/Space-Level-Marble-Extreme-Adults/dp/B011MITJAU But she’s only 5 so it’s a bit too early yet. ????
oh, for your “daughter” but she’s too young.
nice one!
:-)
What is that he couldn’t find? Ok a robot arm lifting the ball is interesting and the materials are precious. But you can buy this from shelf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Du3rJxbgZ0
The finished product is not the goal, it’s the journey to get there… ????
exactly, and i truly believe this should be considered as art too.