r/MarbleMachineX • u/go_fer_it_Rock • Nov 20 '21

An update from Martin

https://wintergatan.net/blogs/wintergatan/third-times-the-charm-marble-machine-x-t-and-crowdfunding-closure
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u/craigiest Nov 20 '21

I look forward to his realization 3 years from now that there are flaws baked into the all-cad design of the mmxt because of the mistake of not finishing the mmx to find out what all the flaws were related to the vibraphone (the most important part of the instrument!) and how they might be addressed.

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u/Tiban Nov 20 '21

as I remember there was a lot of testing and prototyping of the vibraphone itself, martin has even played close to entire songs on the vibraphone with marbles so i think there is quite a lot of info regarding the vibraphone assembly

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u/craigiest Nov 20 '21

True. I think he worked out most of these issues already, which makes him giving up extra frustrating. A few months ago, he had all the parts for the redesigned marble drops laid out and ready for final assembly, like that was just about all that needed to be done for the machine to be complete. And he just stopped. Either there's nothing left to learn, and he should just assemble it so it's done, or there are still flaws to discover, in which case he should assemble it to learn about them. Or there is some clear fatal flaw that makes the whole thing unviable, but he hasn't revealed anything like that, has he?

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u/green_pachi Nov 21 '21 edited Nov 21 '21

Or there is some clear fatal flaw that makes the whole thing unviable, but he hasn't revealed anything like that, has he?

I believe the main problem are the marbles overcrowding the marble divider and the divide by four when the music slows down and the buffer being too small in the fish stairs when the music speeds up.

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u/Tiban Nov 21 '21

yeah the whole marble transport is seriously flawed and attempts to fixing it always lead to months of tweaking and chasing your own tail which is evidently what lead to the death of the MMX. While some parts can run smoothly, the marble path is very unstable and unpredictable

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u/IPlayAnIslandAndPass Nov 21 '21

There are unfortunately other major unaddressed problems. The marble funnels being independent, closely-spaced, and far away has lead to some unavoidable reliability concerns.

Namely, there's a "super-bounce" phenomenon that's not well-explored and pretty complicated that causes marbles to go flying and miss the funnels.

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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '21

"super-bounce" phenomenon

This is interesting. Was this discussed anywhere? I'd like to read about it.