Engineezy, previously often called JBV Artistic or Jay BV, builds actually spectacular machines. However most of them are massive and portability isn’t a function he normally cares about. That was an issue when Engineezy determined to attend Open Sauce 2025, which has grow to be the most important maker occasion of the 12 months. He wished one thing to indicate off whereas he perused the assorted cubicles and nothing he had beforehand constructed match the invoice. So, he reimagined his marble pixel artwork machine as a wearable trend piece for strutting round Open Sauce.
We coated Engineezy’s authentic marble pixel artwork machine final 12 months and it was actually spectacular. On demand, it might 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 so as to accommodate the colours of various pictures. The ensuing machine was fairly large and one of the best ways for Engineezy to make it extra transportable was to scale back the picture decision to 11×11 (sure, there’s a motive for the odd numbers) and the colour palette to 2.
Engineezy got here up with a intelligent strategy 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 observe. By the ability of doubling at every stage, one enter ultimately 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 are the mistaken shade.
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 should 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 last cease mechanism holds the entire 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 might stroll the flooring of Open Sauce whereas everybody admired his handywork.
