Wintergatan

Physics & Form From Function FTW

Design Requirements work in progress

90 degrees boooooooo 45 degrees yeeeeeaaaa

The design requirement process pushed me to gather some more information about how the instruments were supposed to play. So here we are with some prototyping again.

weeeeeoooowww wakawaka weeow

Big Thanks to Louis Barclay for recommending this book on the Marble Machine engineering discord!

I’m making a cardboard model of the new Marble Machine, as a quick way to try different design options. I got the idea from the book ”How Big Things get Done” where the Planning Professor Bent Flyvbjerg recommends cardboard modeling as a low-tech, fast and cheap planning tool for complex projects. I never knew planning could be this much fun, I always thought planning was boring and uncreative. Compared to sketching in CAD this was much faster and felt much more real. Scale 1/10 BOOM!

How can we switch between songs on the new marble machine, fast and reliably? In this video we are looking at a new method to make this possible.

Researching how I can make Steel Balls Dropping on Cymbals sound good.

I was emailing with an Industrial Design engineer from Apple who told me: "One thing I've learned that can really make a product great is to find the magic and bring it forward." I really love that concept and i think it´s essential for the Marble Machine that i allow the whimsical, artistic, non-engineering parts of the project blossom. Giant flywheel? YES! Combine this with a more strict more deliberate design process should bring us closer to our goal this time.

More Moment Of Inertia = Tighter Music! And yeah, I could have discussed a few things better in the video: I think the way to design a wheel like this would be to always leave the hub on the shaft and then just add the spokes/OD perimeter in pie sections, lets say 6 or 8 sections. So we are not disassembling the shaft and gearing/timing belt at all, we are just removing/adding stupid pieces of heavy metal to the hub. The alignment/balancing of the wheel *should be easy*TM to get well within requirements. And the reduced need for speed will also help. We can put most of the weight on the OD where it is doing most work. In a way this was the final missing piece for me personally, the visual identity is in place. All that remains is to grind everyday for a couple of years here we go!

After studying how to improve my design process it's time to roll up the sleeves and actually start implementing what I´ve learned. In this episode I am trying to work from design requirements rather than just designing on a whim. It is not easy internalizing a brand new design sequence and sometimes I am still getting ahead of myself, but I think In general I have a much more grounded view: I am more focused on deciding WHAT the machine should do rather then HOW it should do it. This is the better place to start. Extra thanks to everyone who are sticking around during this very theoretical phase of the project, I am doing what I think I need to do to make progress!

Actually very pleased with this one!

I did this prototype to see how using moving Animusic drums would look on a Marble Machine and It´s much more fun watching the drums play when they move compared too being still. The drums are counterbalanced by weights, no springs are used. I also did this to try a potential setup of the drums on the machine and something like this kind of makes sense. Its a good viewing angle where you can see all the action from the audience perspective. I learned a lot of other useful things from this experiment and enjoyed playing Animusics crazy song swell :) Enjoy!

Our small but very popular instrument, Speldosa – Music Box, has just received a new update. Together with Wintergatan we’ve now added damping for more control. We hope that all you Muggles out there are pleased — because the wizards, have been working!

Plywood is so great you guys I´m seriously