Week 5 Journal Entry

I was unfortunately unable to go to Maker Faire, but I did catch a bit of it online. Despite it having absolutely nothing to do with my project idea, I found the live-size Mousetrap game the most interesting. At first I wasn’t too interested, but then I began to think of all the work that had to go into building those pieces and setting up the trap. I do some scenery work as part of the Entertainment Technology program, so I know the horror of realizing your measurements are off by an inch or something even smaller. With scenery you can often brute-force it into position, but that’s not the case with the Mousetrap. Every measurement would have had to be perfect for the game to work. The part of the machine that is sort of like a scale – it received the ball and then pivoted to deposit the ball in another location – was really cool. This is to say nothing of all the math and planning they must have done to make sure that each piece was built to the proper specifications.

I’ve always liked Rube Goldberg machines for their entertainment value, even if I don’t see them as truly “useful” structures like some of the other things presented at the Maker Faire. I started to think what you could do if you combined Rube Goldberg machines with Arduino, and the coolest one I found was this one, which uses light sensors to control the machine and light up different parts at the appropriate times. I’m not sure if I will end up incorporating this into my project somehow. Perhaps I could try to build a Rube Goldberg machine that uses Arduino chips/sensors that take in sound waves that will trigger each step.