So since the start of the year we have been working on a unit that would lead to building a Rube Goldberg machine at the end. That Rube Goldberg machine is finally complete. About 2 weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the machine at the time. The machine has definitely come a long way since then. At that time we had only just started putting some tracks on.

The machine works perfectly now. Our idea from the start basically worked. All of the metaphor elements that we planned worked or could be easily replaced. The only two things we made to changes to were the cracking of an egg, and the circuit to control two lights. With the circuit we were originally going to use Raspberry Pi to control two small LEDs. However once we started thinking it through fitting the Raspberry Pi on to the machine would be a challenge. We ended up using snap circuits to make a pretty basic circuit that turned off an LED when a photo resistor is covered. The eggs didn’t really work because we planned on filling them with red dye with a needle, but the needle we had didn’t work so we went to plan B. Plan B is a water balloon filled with red dyed water.

One of the key aspects to this project was having a video about our machine. As a group we gave the task of making the video to Lucas. He did a very good job in my opinion. I think the video looks great. Here is the video:

Our machine looks awesome but it definetly doesn’t have the steampunk aesthetic that it was supposed to. I’m probably the one you can most blame for that as I had planned to focus on that part of the project. However as we worked on the machine I spent a lot of time helping with the build of the machine and didn’t spend enough time thinking about ideas for the aesthetic. I did my best to give a steampunk look to it but we didn’t really have enough materials to make it tell a big story.

This project was a lot of fun but I’m not completely satisfied with the way it finished. Going into this project I imagined a really elaborate, cool looking machine. What we discovered is that even simple elements take up a lot of time – for example just spray painting elements can use up most of a class. I feel that in some cases such as our dominoes we had to pack up while our paint was still drying and this meant the dominos did not look as good as we hoped.

I think the biggest takeaway from this project is that Rube Goldberg machines are fun but enormously time consuming. I can only imagine the time that went into building this machine: