This Massive Marble Art-Making Machine Showcases the Creativity of Engineering

Engineering, no matter the specific discipline, tends to have a reputation of being boring and kind of stuffy, similar to accounting (sorry, accountants). But the truth is that engineering provides an opportunity for expressing creativity. Every problem always has multiple solutions and fleshing out your own solution is very much a creative process. If you want proof of that, then you don’t have to look any further than Engineezy’s most recent video on the design and construction of a huge marble art-making machine.

This video was sponsored by Avnet, which happens to be Hackster’s parent company. Avnet has all kinds of resources and services for engineers that are incredibly useful when tackling projects like this one. Engineezy needed the help, because he gave himself a serious challenge with this machine. It creates large images from marbles. Each image contains 1,024 marbles in a 32×32 grid and there are eight different marble colors. The machine can repeatedly create any requested image on-demand, so Engineezy had to design it to reset itself, sort the marbles by color, transport the marbles to the top of the machine, and then place all 1,024 marbles in the appropriate columns in the appropriate order.

Almost every part on this machine is a custom design that was either 3D-printed or laser-cut specifically for this project. Engineezy does a great job explaining some of the thinking behind his design decisions, as well as shining a light on some of the trial-and-error that would normally happen behind the scenes.

For example, his initial sorting mechanism would have required at least seven motors, each with their own driver and a couple of pins on a microcontroller. But Engineezy was able to dramatically simplify the design by switching to a servo motor to direct each marble down the appropriate chute after the color detection step. Another example is the clever feed system at the top, which sends marbles rolling down ramps made of coil springs that can adapt to the mechanism’s movement.

But even with those design choices, this machine still has a lot of motors and so there are several microcontroller development boards working together to control everything. Most of those are Freenove ESP32-WROOM development boards, but the feed mechanism (inspired by independent dual-extruder 3D printer gantries) uses an Arduino Nano ESP32. One final ESP32 dev board accepts the image input and coordinates all of the other boards.

This machine makes art, but it is also a piece of art in its own right. And, it proves that engineering is absolutely a creative profession.