Engineer Ivan Miranda has done it once again. A 3D-printing buff, he’s brought us some wild creations in the past. His most recent one is the scroller that uses black and white marbles to display text. By making it giant and round, Miranda ensured it can keep displaying text endlessly. Whether it’s a text message or a long letter, the scroller can display it all.
If you and I had unlimited access to a 3D printer, what would we print? An action figure? A musical instrument maybe? Perhaps even a to-scale model of a bike, car, airplane, or rocket. But this is where YouTubers are different.
They don’t think about what one can do in an afternoon or over a weekend. The vision extends over weeks and months, and the final video you see is just a snippet of the work that went on behind the scenes.
Interesting Engineering has previously covered Miranda’s builds, and they consisted of a motorbike, go-kart, and even a treadmill. Needless to say, they were not to-scale models but working ones. While these are impressive, Miranda does have a online reputation for building display clocks with marbles, and this time, he has gone above and beyond his previous achievements.
Giant Scroller
For his latest, Miranda has ditched the digits of his digital clocks for text. In theory, if you can do digits, you can do text. The major difference, however, is where and how these letters are displayed. While the digital clock and its variations had to contend with changing numbers, everything happened in a relatively small space.
For the scroller, Miranda chose a giant circular design, and while that gives him a large canvas to showcase the text, it also adds immense complexity to the operation. For someone like Miranda, who has been making digital content for over five years, complexity is where things start getting interesting.
The solution to solving the complexity challenge is multiple iterations with more 3D-printed parts that we can even imagine and the ease with which they fit into the grand plan of making the device work.
How does it work?
The scroller consists of a giant circumferential ring which is made up of 3D-printed parts and where the letters are displayed. A few things that are not 3D printed in the structure are ball bearings made of steel and a stepper motor that makes the the wheel move.
The crucial component of the entire assembly is the selector arm that decides whether a black marble or a white one needs to be dispatched in a particular direction to make a letter. This arm is also powered by a stepper motor, while an infrared sensor helps it make the distinction between marble colors. The setup also boasts a marble collector that sends marbles that fall off the bottom back into the system.
Though made entirely of 3D-printed parts, the full setup is massive and fills Miranda’s workshop. Like with any other engineering project, things do go off sometimes, and letters appear a bit crooked. But with a little help from its human creator, the system returns to displaying large blocks of text endlessly.