The Piano Printer - Digital Marble Machine

5 years ago
17

The marbles bounce off the keyboard to play the notes, and collect at the bottom to print a picture. See how fast you can guess what it is!

I found a way to communicate back and forth with Algodoo from an external program that I wrote. One future feature I would like to add are particle trails behind the marbles to indicate the note duration. These videos are all leading to me wanting to make my own physics engine so I can have complete control (I can make it deterministic!). It might be fun to make videos documenting this. I also think it would be pretty cool if I could input an image and midi file to my program and have it automate the process of converting it into self assembling pixel art. Right now I still have to do a lot by hand. Eventually I may make a video explaining how I did it if people are interested, but it would require me to talk, which is weird considering I haven't really done that in a video before, other than some yells of joy. Pretty much everything that you can imagine going wrong went wrong. Since Algodoo isn't deterministic I had to lots of trial and error to swap around colors until it finally worked. The funniest mistake I made was misspelling "Canon" as "Cannon", so I had to backtrack lots of work. Good thing my code is always super well commented so I can quickly make changes (/s). Thanks for watching!

My inspiration to make this originated from a combination of Animusic and Wintergatan. Big fan of both.

Original midi file by nusmax. I did have to edit it and remove some of the notes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9tHW67f6T0

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