Captainowie

I have a bunch of spares, but it seems I always pick not quite the right things to have spares of!

Do you really want all six faces moving? What about the face that the cube is sitting on?

You can test this with your fingers. Hold a beam with your thumbs in the middle, and forefingers at the ends and see how much force it takes to deflect. Then rotate the beam around it's long axis and try again - there's a noticeable difference in the amount of deflection you get for a given amount of finger pull. Orient your beams with the holes parallel to the load!

I probably should have shot a short vid, rather than rely on stills alone to show how it works. All it does is step a diameter around a circumference. For Pi diameters, you get one full rotation of the output (that's what Pi means), and one full rotation of the input crank steps two diameters, hence Pi:2. The hardest part was keeping the "diameter" wheel in the same plane while still forcing it to keep contact with the "circumference" wheel - though I could probably have done a better job of it than I did here. The precision of this is comes down to the ratio between the thickness of the wheel part and its diameter, which in this case is about 10%. If you wanted to do a proper version next year, with an actual explanation and coordinated colour scheme, I wouldn't take offence!

You're right, probably not. Sorry @TeamThrifty, I didn't intend for it to come across as a lecture.

Yeah, but this (and your previous effort) relies on already knowing the value of Pi to some precision - you'd use exactly the same techniques to get a ratio of any rational number. Also, it's enormous. I built a much more compact device that has a Pi:2 ratio, computed directly from the definition of Pi! Aside: [removed]

There are already lots of amazing GBC things here and here I can't see this thread adding anything new.

Upload to some hosting site (e.g. bricksafe.com) and use the links from there.

Mechanical one-at-a-time widgets are not a new concept. You can see my own implementation here And several more in this video from a few years ago. Yours is nice too.

If you don't mind a learning curve that's a little steeper, I'd recommend LDCad as an alternative editor. It has a triangle solver so that you can set precisely the angles you need for each part, and relative grids, so that once you have one part on the correct angle, you can set the relative grid to that angle, so that all parts connected to your sloping part are positioned correctly.

... wouldn't one need more than 60 balls in "just over 1 min" to meet the 1 ball per second spec? Not that it'd be a huge problem, most shows I've taken stats at average 0.4 - 0.6 balls per second.

Surely an infinite chain of gears would behave very much as the very finite version at the top of this thread. The friction may well increase without limit, but that's no different than sticking an anchored axle through an off-centre hole.

If you're going to include banana gears, you've got to put in Hailfire wheels too!

As long as your laptop meets or exceed the Stud.io recommended specs, you should be fine. The overhead in Wine translating Windows system calls to Linux ones is not great, though there may be some configuration changes you'll need to make to get peak performance.

Two axleholes in bricks separated by two plates in the vertical direction are the same distance apart as two axleholes separated by one axlehole in the horizontal direction. Given that that's the spacing of that gear pairing, there really shouldn't be any problem with the setup you posted.