Blog (Tips & News)

Giant robotic ball throwing marimba + wine glass player

Some interesting things that may not be obvious just from the video: the machine actually creates a new song based on a short theme entered into the computer. Those balls get launched almost 6 feet in the air, and according to an email from the creator, only about 1/5000 miss! It was installed in a store front for a while, and had to operate some 14 hours a day... Another fun-fact, one challenge was finding a liquid that acted and looked like water, but wouldn't evaporate. ..."we ended up using the main ingredient in loctite- PEG dimethacrylate. works pretty well to create the necessary stick/slip condition."

As an engineering geek, I thought a lot of the how-it-works videos buried within absolutmachines.com were just as interesting as their main demo video. Click the blog post heading for a list of favorites.

First click on absolut quartet on the top bar, then "about the machine", then "Behind the Scenes"--this is where the good stuff is.

How the ball throwing, reclaiming and indexing system works:

• Circuitry and Loaders.mov
• sand ball test.mov: to test repeatability and accuracy, they spread sand out and watched where balls would make marks
• Ball latch.mov
• ball top view.mov
• dan explanation.mov
• powder test
• shot across

Also neat, the first algorithmically generated song: FirstAlgSong.mov

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