It's a real shame the croud is a bit... unsophisticated. The machine is an utter work of genius. People have made video games that revolved around less sophisticated and featureful puzzle boxes. And it's made entirely of wood. It's got logic gates. It plays music. It has tons of puzzle locks. It's gorgeous.
I think it's entirely fair that he claims on the site that it's the coolest desk in the world. I would love just to see all the things it can do - heck I'd pay for that short video.
Certainly not everyone, to be sure. Really, I'm sorta griping about that lady who's like "But can it play other songs?" It seemed remarkably ungracious. A lot of the crowd jokes were kinda lame, but that's my projection of an overly-reverential attitude about it.
My comment really does a disservice to the useful comments/questions. Like "why try to build a pipe organ?" which honestly I think we all wanted to ask.
And - full disclosure - I would have totally wasted my chance to ask something meaningful, as I woulda gone full stupid basking in the presence of it.
Just as a small follow-up, there's a few videos that precedes that one where you can glimpse a bit of its inner workings: (Part 1 of 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejbC9Oaor2E
This seems like something I should have found in the original Myst. What an awesome thing to have. The wood grain alone without all the contraptions looks amazing. Incredible piece.
And not just the original Myst, the elegance and engineering plausibility of the puzzles were also beautifully achieved in other parts of the series. Very similar to this, for sure. The difficulty has tended to decrease slightly, but damn, Riven was hard.
I'm sure many puzzles in the series could be used as templates for very entertaining real-world puzzles. Just imagine an escape room based on Exile's Amateria:
What an amazing skill set this guy has. Woodworking, puzzle design, and programming(with wood!). I'd be interested to know who commissioned it and for what purpose.
That is absolutely amazing. It reminds me of this table (though that's not really a woodworking project, more of a metal working project that is clothed in wood):
I learned this stuff by playing with the pneumatic elements Lego used to (still does?) make. There's actually a lot of literature from this perspective, try searching for "lego pneumatic logic" and the like.
Now that's fanatical woodworking. Even the screws and air pipes are made of wood.
There's a long history of pneumatic logic in pipe organs. Older large pipe organs have wooden switching units the size of an upright piano. But they're not 100% wood; they have flexible bellows and rubber or lead tubes. Doing it entirely in wood is impressive.
