Marble Display

heres a photo.

I broke one af the stairs ( top left corner of the image ). So I cut 4 new ones to have some backups if I'll brake some more.

Now I need to find small enougth electric magnets (max 8mm) and I can start assembling.

the gears aren't in the 3D model because I generated them on a gear generating website and some how my CAD program doesn't wants to extrude them.

I tried out some stuff with the marbles and figured out that its really hard to get a stable speed and just a a bit angled ground would destroy the whole timing. So I'll make another lift and use the lift as the display. But it's a bit boring if the marbles just roll back to the start, so I have the idea to make music with the backrolling marbles and diffrent small drumms. I'll start constructing the lift and cut the parts next days.

Yesterday I ordered 500 marbles with a diameter of 10 mm. I need to wait for them to make some tests to find out the right angle for the ramp ( maybe I even need to make the ramp a bit curved to get a constant speed ) before I can start constructing the whole thing.

But heres already a raw construction plan for one column of the display.

I'm planing to use 4 mm thick wood and cut out the pieces with a lasercutter.

The fourth layer will be the first of the next column.

The stick that's connected with the Marbleswitch will get pushed and pulled by a electromagnet.

To control the electromagnets I'm going to use an arduino.

You maybe already noticed that the middle part is floating in the air. My solution for that is to put metal tubes through the middle part of all columns and hold them left and right beside the whole Marble Display.

The elevatorwheels will be connected with one thick metal tube that goes through the middle of all elevatorwheels. The tube will be connected with a motor.

The idea of the lifting system comes from this video

To get the timing write I'll do something like that: