Once upon a time, at the museum at Los Alamos, there was a chain reaction simulator known as “Pinocchio”, because (supposedly) it wanted to be a real nuclear reactor.
This consisted of a large transparent box, at the bottom of which was a plate containing a large number of wells, each with a solenoid at the bottom. Each solenoid had a Ping-Pong ball resting on top of it, & was actuated by a photocell. When one Ping-Pong ball was dropped into the box, it would end up in one of the wells, tripping the solenoid, and resulting in the ejection of both the initial ball and the one in the well. This would rapidly lead to the ejection of all the balls, after the fashion of a chain reaction with a multiplication factor of greater than unity (probably not quite 2, since some balls would fall back into empty wells).
Is there any interest in creating something like this at DMS?
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Hey Carson,
Inside of the vector group there are similar projects brewing. Nick Dangerous is planning on building an interactive pinball display with cut outs that show how the different parts work. I believe that Shawn is also considering a similar endeavor. No one is planning the exact model that you are speaking of, but I’m sure if you helped one of the other projects, you could learn what is need to build yours and possibly gain some help.
Hope to see the balls fly,
Nick Sainz
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I have seen video of a simulator built using loaded mousetraps; a bit simpler and cheaper.
They had one of those in the Disney film on the subject ; but it is exceedingly laborious to reset, & so would not likely be used with any frequency.
Ok, I’ll give you that…