I participated in GBC at Brickworld Chicago in 2023! It was fun, but much more work than you'd expect. It's a full day's work keeping all the machines running, clearing jams, herding balls back into the chain when one mechanism goes out of wack. It was fun to meet the other folks there.
I should really get around to properly documenting my design, but here's a short video of the version I brought to Brickworld: https://youtu.be/wdP656HuY6M
I wish the Lego Technix line would expand to be more about weird machines like this.
I asked my brother-in-law if my nephew would like a more advanced Technix set as a gift, he said no, they were mostly cars and vehicles and he wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have been at that age either. A wicked Rube Goldberg machine though…
I think the Technic Lego kits that I grew up with (that were more about how things worked rather than looking exactly like the thing) have been rebranded as "Lego Education": https://education.lego.com/en-gb/shop/secondary/
My kids are mostly uninterested in the cars, but they loved the recent 42197 Earth and Moon orbiting the Sun.
They also like using the sorted boxes of Technic pieces to build crazy contraptions and my oldest has gotten into Spike Prime programming (Scratch/Blockly or Python).
Similarly, the xkcd webcomic made an infinitely tileable, user-submitted version of this for his april fools comic this year: https://xkcd.com/2916/#xt=10&yt=78
I helped man one at a Brickworld. Lots of chasing down little plastic soccer balls all over the floor.
The whole thing just makes sense as a software dev. There's an input standard, output standard, and I guess a processing rate expectation (or not - that was probably the second biggest issue we faced was some slow contraptions that would back up). (The first biggest issue was a contraption that "pinged" the balls through the air to a landing container and would sometimes send them off randomly or kids would try to catch them.)
This is partly from LEGO fans previous work on railroad, town, space base, etc. modular builds where they have a spec for where each unit should connect and people bring in their own creations and link them all up.
I've always wanted to do something like the great ball contraption in general at makerfaires but open to all kinds of build materials, techniques, power, etc.
I think the spec is supposed to be one ball per second, but I guess that's not really adhered to.
Tangentially, I think it'd be interesting to use something like this to explain the networking concepts of throughout, latency, jitter, baud vs bits per second, symbol rate and bits per symbol.
You can find analogous examples in the main video to compare to all of those concepts.
I'd suggest looking through the videos on akiyuki's channel. It's a gold mine of novel Lego contraptions and isn't limited to GBCs, although it is majorly that.
The undisputed king of GBC. His modules are works of art. So many incredibly intricate and innovated mechanisms with lots of precisely coordinated parts, yet driven from a single standard Lego motor. And the videos are well-shot, clear and to the point.
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I should really get around to properly documenting my design, but here's a short video of the version I brought to Brickworld: https://youtu.be/wdP656HuY6M
https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/toys/marble-runs
Really well-made, excellent instructions and a very Lego-like experience.
I asked my brother-in-law if my nephew would like a more advanced Technix set as a gift, he said no, they were mostly cars and vehicles and he wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have been at that age either. A wicked Rube Goldberg machine though…
They're pretty expensive, though!
They also like using the sorted boxes of Technic pieces to build crazy contraptions and my oldest has gotten into Spike Prime programming (Scratch/Blockly or Python).
Searching for GBC yields a bunch of other kits: https://buildamoc.com/search?q=gbc&type=product
The whole thing just makes sense as a software dev. There's an input standard, output standard, and I guess a processing rate expectation (or not - that was probably the second biggest issue we faced was some slow contraptions that would back up). (The first biggest issue was a contraption that "pinged" the balls through the air to a landing container and would sometimes send them off randomly or kids would try to catch them.)
This is partly from LEGO fans previous work on railroad, town, space base, etc. modular builds where they have a spec for where each unit should connect and people bring in their own creations and link them all up.
I've always wanted to do something like the great ball contraption in general at makerfaires but open to all kinds of build materials, techniques, power, etc.
Tangentially, I think it'd be interesting to use something like this to explain the networking concepts of throughout, latency, jitter, baud vs bits per second, symbol rate and bits per symbol.
You can find analogous examples in the main video to compare to all of those concepts.
Some favorites:
- Catch and spin robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXF7mgZ9mzk
- Basketball shooter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yud9ukF5cV8
- Pole dancing quartet (SFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0a7Z70WxM
The railway system series is also great, you'll see the step by step construction of the system and later on its use in a GBC event.