A 3D Printed Marble Clock, However It’s Scrolling Textual content

With the subject of marble clocks having been fairly nicely explored at this level, it raises the query of how straightforward it might be to take the essential precept and create a textual content show utilizing black and white marbles. As [Ivan Miranda] came upon in a recent marble text scroller project, that is removed from straightforward.

The motive why a scrolling textual content show was picked comes right down to not eager to be restricted to a set variety of digits. This resulted in a spherical wheel design, with inside metal ball bearings and a stepper motor on each the wheel and an inside selector mechanism. These respectively align the marble channels and choose the suitable shade of marbles to be dropped into any of the wheel’s slots, creating the suitable sequence of marbles for the goal textual content.

Perhaps probably the most wonderful factor about it’s that it’s a completely huge construction, but it’s all 3D printed and bolted collectively. It took quite a few trial-and-error cycles, and debugging points just like the IR sensors getting confused by daylight, however it now largely appears to work all proper.

There are nonetheless some remaining points, corresponding to having to manually house the wheel earlier than beginning, and the ratio of black vs white marbles could cause sudden gaps within the last textual content. Despite this the textual content is kind of legible and positively infinite.