estimated reading time: 2 min

Engineezy, formerly known as JBV Creative or Jay BV, builds really impressive machines. But most of them are large and portability isn’t a feature he usually cares about. That was a problem when Engineezy decided to attend Open Sauce 2025, which has become the biggest maker event of the year. He wanted something to show off while he perused the various booths and nothing he had previously built fit the bill. So, he reimagined his marble pixel art machine as a wearable fashion piece for strutting around Open Sauce.

We covered Engineezy’s original marble pixel art machine last year and it was really impressive. On demand, it could arrange colored marbles in several columns to form a grid of “pixels” that create an image. Each image had a resolution of 32×32, which required a total of 1024 marbles. In practice, the machine needed many, many more marbles than that in order to accommodate the colors of different images. The resulting machine was pretty massive and the best way for Engineezy to make it more portable was to reduce the image resolution to 11×11 (yes, there is a reason for the odd numbers) and the color palette to two.

Engineezy came up with a clever way to get the marbles into the desired columns: binary gates. They work a bit like transistors, creating a path like tree roots that the marbles can follow. Through the power of doubling at each stage, one input eventually leads to 12 outputs — only two of the four legs on the second stage were doubled. That 12th output is there so the machine can recirculate marbles that are the wrong color.

Unlike the original machine, this one only produces black-and-white images. So, if it needs a white marble and both of the hoppers have a black marble next in line, it will simply send a black marble back down into the hopper and hope a white marble comes up next (repeating if it has especially bad luck).

The gates are actuated by servo motors and marbles feed from the hopper back to the top with a double auger mechanism. A final stop mechanism holds all of the marbles in place in the columns until it is time to reset the image, at which point a servo moves to release them back into the hoppers.

Finally, Engineezy mounted the machine onto laser-cut plates attached to the back of a jacket, so he could walk the floors of Open Sauce while everyone admired his handywork.

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