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  • The Shed

    TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

    Feb 15, 2019 7 minutes
    By Enrico Miglino
    Photographs: Enrico Miglino

    In this issue, I explore the development steps of what I call ‘The Christmas Joy Spreading Machine’. This is possibly the most complicated project I have ever made and it is based on the BBC Micro Bit. The original idea was to make a machine using cardboard and a few other salvaged and recyclable materials. I adapted the project for 2018 Christmas Eve — the original project only had a different name and a few different final-assembly details.

    The project is modular and I hope it inspires other makers who may want to build their own, creative ‘joy machines’. The main idea is to build a cardboard rotating engine. This kind of mechanism is commonly referred to as a ‘marble machine’, because they are based more or less on a complex path into which some kind of ball slides. At the end of the free-falling path, a motorized lift drives the ball to the top of the path again, and the cycle continues indefinitely as long as the motor moving the lifter is on.

    The first machines of this

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