Engineezy, previously often called JBV Inventive or Jay BV, builds actually spectacular machines. However most of them are giant and portability isn’t a characteristic he often cares about. That was an issue when Engineezy determined to attend Open Sauce 2025, which has develop into the largest maker occasion of the yr. He needed one thing to point out off whereas he perused the varied cubicles and nothing he had beforehand constructed match the invoice. So, he reimagined his marble pixel artwork machine as a wearable vogue piece for strutting round Open Sauce.
We lined Engineezy’s authentic marble pixel artwork machine final yr and it was actually spectacular. On demand, it may organize coloured marbles in a number of columns to type a grid of “pixels” that create a picture. Every picture had a decision of 32×32, which required a complete of 1024 marbles. In apply, the machine wanted many, many extra marbles than that in an effort to accommodate the colours of various pictures. The ensuing machine was fairly huge and one of the simplest ways for Engineezy to make it extra transportable was to scale back the picture decision to 11×11 (sure, there’s a cause for the odd numbers) and the colour palette to 2.
Engineezy got here up with a intelligent technique to get the marbles into the specified columns: binary gates. They work a bit like transistors, making a path like tree roots that the marbles can comply with. By way of the ability of doubling at every stage, one enter finally results in 12 outputs — solely two of the 4 legs on the second stage had been doubled. That twelfth output is there so the machine can recirculate marbles which can be the fallacious coloration.
In contrast to the unique machine, this one solely produces black-and-white pictures. So, if it wants a white marble and each of the hoppers have a black marble subsequent in line, it’s going to merely ship a black marble again down into the hopper and hope a white marble comes up subsequent (repeating if it has particularly dangerous luck).
The gates are actuated by servo motors and marbles feed from the hopper again to the highest with a double auger mechanism. A ultimate cease mechanism holds all the marbles in place within the columns till it’s time to reset the picture, at which level a servo strikes to launch them again into the hoppers.
Lastly, Engineezy mounted the machine onto laser-cut plates connected to the again of a jacket, so he may stroll the flooring of Open Sauce whereas everybody admired his handywork.