If you’re proud of yourself for building one of Lego’s many pre-packed kits, prepare to feel humbled. Builders in Japan have built an enormous Lego contraption that endlessly moves tiny balls in a huge mechanical loop.
The so-called Great Ball Contraption was built as this summer’s Brickfest in Japan, as reported by Jason Kottke via Hacker News. As you can see from the YouTube video embedded below, this giant machine is comprised of lots of tiny Lego devices that ingeniously transport balls from one end to the other.
The 15-minute video shows how the machine operates in one huge loop, with balls continually circulating around the machinery.
There are 53 different modules in the Great Ball Contraption, which use a variety of hugely imaginative ways to transport balls from one end to the other.
The contraption starts with the balls moving round a giant Ferris Wheel. Other modules include “Basket Shooter”, where the balls are accurately pinged through a plastic basketball hoop; “Acceleration”, where the balls are spun at great speed and slowly move through a clear Perspex window; and “Robust Catapult”, which sees the balls fired over a gap of several feet, before landing in a colored container.
The 53 modules were built by only eight people over the course of the two-day event held in Kobe this June.
The Great Ball Contraptions
The Great Ball Contraptions are a regular feature of Lego builder events all over the world. The Contraptions even have published rules and specifications, so that modules “can be assembled into a collaborative display without pre-planning or modification,” according to the Great Ball Contraption website.
According to the rules, each module should have an “in-basket” that measures 10 Lego studs by 10 studs, and should be ten bricks tall. The in-basket must be on the left-hand side of the device and the output on the right.
Each module should be able to accept balls at a rate of one per second, and the balls can pass through the machine either continuously or in batches, but the batches shouldn’t be any greater than 30 balls.
“The otherwise pointless handling of balls, and the myriad ways this is accomplished, gives great ball contraptions the impression of a Rube Goldberg machine,” the website adds. A Rube Goldberg machine is named after the American cartoonist, who devised machines to perform simple tasks in ridiculously elaborate ways.
