I Found a 130 Year Old Solution for the Marble Machine

Hi Martin, Have you ever considered an Eddy Current brake for your speed governor? This could be as simple as an aluminium or copper (conductive, nom-magnetic material) disc, which rotates through a fixed set of permanent magnets facing one another. The moving disc through the magnetic field induces a current in the disc, which creates its own magnetic field which opposes the field of the magnets, creating resistance. The resistance is directly proportional to the speed, so it is self-regulating. The speed/torque relationship can be altered by changing the diameter of the disc, the strength (or quantity) of the magnets, and the gap. Many roller coasters around the world now use Eddy Current brakes (using a linear fin on the train passing through fixed magnets on the track) because of their smooth stopping effect (because the braking force lowers as the train slows down, like you would let up on the brake pedal when stopping when driving, to reduce jerk), reliability and lack of maintenance. This type of speed governor would operate silently, with no moving parts (other than the disc itself), and no wear. I suspect this comment will get lost in the sea but I hope it does find you and you give it a think :) Cheers, -Iain

Rather than a spiral programming wheel, it may be more useful to have a wheel with selectable parallel tracks - so you can keep playing a particular 8-bar loop as many times as you like, but switch to another loop by moving it a few mm left or right.

Fun fact: The video data on a VHS is stored in diagonal to also make better use of the tape. Similar concept to the spiral.

I'd happily watch you restore / examine antique mechanical instruments all day long , hope you keep producing this kind of content after the inevitable world tour! 😊

Its so good to see Martin's enthusiasm growing, and returning! with every video

Spiral programming is such a simple and elegant solution to increasing song length without increasing the cylinder size. I'm glad you found out about it and showed it to all of us here!

Super vid! There is always the idea I told you about a few years ago - a programming belt instead of a drum - Older non CNC machines ran on these coding belts - a belt can be much longer than a drum circumference and make use of 2, 3 or 4 smaller rollers to extend the play length.

It's such a great idea to look at old mechanical instruments for ideas. People spent hundreds of years perfecting the mechanics.

The flyball governor prototype is creating a noticeable amount of noise. Most of the instruments in the museum seem to use an air brake instead, probably for that reason. The phonograph is the only exception, but that makes sense because the phonograph would be quite loud compared to most instruments, enough that the extra noise doesn't really matter.

I have a mechanical engineering degree and I am so thankful this channel exists. So many fascinating things I would not have known about before discovering this channel, thank you for showing the mechanical instrument museum, I'd love to visit one day.

It would be very cool if you programmed a custom song for the Swedish table.

Use water as a propulsion weight. This way you don't have to transport this weight to every performance.

This takes me back to the old Music Machine Mondays. Feels like you’re getting your groove back!

You should test how your governor solutions behave in response to a heavier load and to changing load conditions. It's a feedback control loop problem, and the load is a very important part of the equation.

Haha, finally! I've been thinking about how to make the programming wheel be able to play longer music, and having it be spiraling was one of the ideas I thought about. I had no idea it's actually been done before, but it's such an obvious solution it'd be more surprising if there were no historical examples of it. Rediscovering history is pretty cool! I wonder if perhaps having smaller programming wheels might be desirable. The wheel in the Swedish table is to tiny that you could dedicate an entire wheel per instrument really

Martin- You can have unlimited playing time, even an entire concert, without having to reconfigure the machine. Look into the control mechanism for the Jacquard Loom. It uses rigid punch cards to encode information, and you can stack any number of cards linked together in a belt. There are even large symphonium devices that were built using these cards to play a calliope, drums, cymbals and bells in one machine. The only trick is the card feeder and reader, because it works better with holes encoding the notes instead of pegs. ( flat cards with holes in them can stack ) These were used in the weaving industry to be able to automate looms for weaving an unlimitedly complex pattern. For a longer piece of music you just added more cards to the chain. The one I saw was even able to sustain organ notes of different lengths, rather than single impulses.

It's so rare to find those that make machines beautiful to put something beautiful back int he world. Seeing you meld art and engineering always makes me so so happy. This is a great video!

Very cool video! I think it's awesome that all of your latest design choices have already been proven through historical precedence. Excited for continued progress, you're a modern day Mechanical Music Mastermind!

I think perhaps the most important thing that Martin is juuuust starting to learn is the ever-critical KISS principal - Keep It Simple Stupid! Seriously, each extra bit of complexity is just another thing that can fail and will be a huge pain, simplify everything as much as feasible.

Babe wake up it’s Wintergatan time