Rube...

Do you know who Rube Goldberg is? He was an American cartoonist who was most famous depicting complex machines that do simple tasks.

His name has now become attached to the practice of making machines like his cartoons that contain loads of long chain reaction things that ultimately finalise in some small task like firing a camera, cracking an egg or displaying a sign. There is loads of examples on ThaToob and one of the more recognizable ones is the Honda advert.

The desk at work behind me has an odd CD tray that seems to automatically eject through the night sometime so I've started building a Rube machine that is triggered by this CD tray. I've not gotten very far but I came in this morning to an apparent successful run. The CD tray opened and pushed a drinks tray onto a levered spoon which catapulted this foil ball over the monitor and into the waiting sweetie tin. I'm still not sure if it was planted there without my knowledge as the test later in day with the most of the same variables, fired the ball clean over the cabinet and into the corridor. It did have some ballast last night which may have helped curb the trajectory but I'll never know.

It's been reset with a slightly different leverage to hopefully fire it into the tin where I've created a funnel to get it down to a second tin.

Fingers crossed.