His journey post v1 has been fascinating to watch. I hope he eventually makes a full length documentary based on his vlogs. It’s a great story about the relationship between ideas, execution, business, and real life in the context of the modern maker economy.
I've been following his journey for years, it's been a fascinating and some times heartbreaking story not to dissimilar to Sisyphus. Every other chapter is about him renewing his mental strength, grit, determination, and then months later tearing it all apart because of fundamental flaws. Repeat for years. His mental health is an underlying theme throughout the story we're watching and I worry for him.
With that said, he is truly an imaginative and great engineer and musician and while my discipline is primarily software, he's taught me a lot about design principles I apply today. Namely, keep things simple, emphasis on unit testing and measuring results, recognizing and addressing sunk cost fallacy and many many others.
I've grown to really respect and admire him. But I fear this project has a stranglehold over his mental health and I fear for what that means for his future if he cannot get to a place he is truly happy with.
God speed Martin, I hope you can get the boulder up the hill one day.
I love its mechanical-only design; that really is a piece of musical art.
And at 1:30 in the video, it looks like LEGO is used for the encoding pegs (also possibly some gears and supports at 1:36).
Someone else made an entire version in LEGO [1] [2] but without marbles and playbacking to/covering the original:
He learned after 3 years that he made a few things too complicated because 'it looked cool' and he should have instead kept the design 'dumb'.