[Gzumwalt] did things a little differently with his Pink and Green Domino Machine II, a 3D printed device that drops dominoes in a neat row ready for toppling over. Unlike his earlier version, this one holds dominoes laying flat in a hopper that’s accessible from the top for easy loading. The previous unit had an elegance to it, but it was more limited with respect to how many dominoes it could hold at a time. This new version solves that problem while also showing off a slick mechanism that gracefully slides a domino from the bottom of the hopper, then gently positions it standing on end before opening a rear door to let it out as it moves to the next position. One of the interesting things [gzumwalt] discovered when designing this device was that there isn’t really a “standard” size of domino. That’s one of the reasons the demo uses 3D printed blocks.
Pulling this off with a single small DC motor is a remarkable achievement; the mechanism even stably ejects a positioned domino from the rear without halting its forward motion in the process. An animation of how the mechanism works is embedded below, be sure to check it out!
Dominoes have been at the center of some interesting projects, such as a video demonstrating logic gate operation with dominoes, and we also saw these beautiful metal dominoes created from scratch.
Yes!!!!
Thanks!
You can buy the same mechanism. It even comes with an annoying bell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV_9ZiWXTHY
I have one more alike the one in the article at home, off the shelf
That last pink brick appears like magic out of thin air ;). It’s not on the stack at 0:22 !
The bottom two dominoes aren’t visible through the window.
Yes, that is correct!
Wow this is great.
Wonder if it can be made to do corners as well ?
Thank you, and yes the next version will have wifi controlled operation including steering.
Or, connect it to an app that takes designs and lays out a pattern.
DominoCAD and DominoCAM – the apps we never knew we needed until now.
Now that’s thinking brilliantly!
Reminds me of the Domino Rally Domino Dealer I had when I was a kid.
I have been trying to remember what that thing was called for years, I was starting to think it was all a fever dream.
We had one many, many years ago for our kids but it frequently jammed. I’ve had no jamming problems with this one (fingers crossed…).
That would be an excellent improvement – mine frequently jammed as well, and was a pain to load, but when it worked it was awesome. Interested to see the steerable version.
Brilliant!! You are the most amazing 3d designer around! Anyone with a 3d printer needs to check out GZUMWALT!
Thank you John, perhaps older, perhaps age induced experience, but brilliant, I’m not so sure on that one….
Thanks again!
Greg
If it had a 2nd motor for steering (could steer like that commercial version), you could add remote control.
But it is too slow to drive around, so maybe better would be to add a micro-controller to program patterns.
Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWvYm5YgyDw&feature=youtu.be
I mean it is to slow to control by hand; it would be painful to wait to “draw” what you want. So it would be better to have a computer control its path (as others have suggested, too)
Cool, make this thing about 10 time larger and it could lay out cones on the road.