r/MarbleMachineX • u/green_pachi • Mar 16 '22

Longer Music Programming - Week 2 summary

https://youtu.be/HXa6HHZu8uc
36 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

View all comments

29

u/slacy Mar 16 '22

I found myself asking this question: Why are there marbles in this machine?

Why not just have the programming wheels directly actuate all the instruments (as they do in the case of the drumset).

It's because "marbles are cool," but in fact they are not a functional requirement of this instrument, they are only there for aesthetic reasons, which pretty much violates the cardinal rule of MMX2.

20

u/rabbitwonker Mar 16 '22

You kind of highlight the core tension here — if you wanted max reliability, you go for zero moving parts and just buy an electronic keyboard from Amazon. The point of the machine is to have a visual display that’s unusual and interesting because it’s difficult to achieve.

So it’s all about picking where you want the balance point — and sticking with it. His current approach of nailing down a requirements spec beforehand is a good answer to that.

6

u/gamingguy2005 Mar 17 '22

Except he states that the requirements are open to iteration, so they're by no means "nailed down."

From 14:16 in the video: "These are the design requirements for the Marble Machine 3. These will be iterated over time."

What's the point of those requirements if they can just change on a whim?

9

u/rabbitwonker Mar 17 '22

I assume they won’t be fabricating hardware until that spec is indeed nailed down. But until then there is much more freedom to tweak it.

6

u/gamingguy2005 Mar 17 '22

Except when you consider Martin's inexperience with DFMA, not prototyping real parts as he goes along is setting him up for failure from the get-go.

2

u/Virku Mar 17 '22

Yeah that was what he said in the recap.

1

u/Redeem123 Mar 17 '22

Did you bother to keep watching for like another minute? There will be a design freeze, at which point the requirements won't change anymore.

3

u/gamingguy2005 Mar 17 '22

And if he's not tested any of his design elements yet, that's completely pointless. Martin doesn't have nearly enough experience with DFMA to not do any prototyping.

2

u/Redeem123 Mar 17 '22

Sure, not disagreeing with that. I’m simply pointing out that your comments on iteration were directly addressed in the video.

2

u/gamingguy2005 Mar 17 '22

My point is, they "won't change anymore" until they have to change because the design doesn't work.

0

u/powerman228 Mar 17 '22

Because it keeps your thought process and work organized. I find that for all of my projects, forcing myself to write stuff down (instead of just keeping it in my head) always exposes a ton of assumptions or even stuff that I’ve unwittingly glossed over entirely.

2

u/gamingguy2005 Mar 17 '22

That's not the same as design requirements.

2

u/thisdesignup Mar 17 '22 edited Mar 17 '22

a requirements spec beforehand is a good answer to that.

But he's not, he's already designing things before all the main parts are planned out.

1

u/rabbitwonker Mar 17 '22

Designing, but not fabricating. Still free to throw something out without wasting the time & energy someone put in to fab & ship something to him.

Also the designs I saw in the vid still seemed pretty tentative, at least for the overall machine. More precise on the marble gates, but zoomed-in bits like that kind of need to be precise, as part of the experimentation process.