You too can turn your smart home into a marble run with this cool Kickstarter project

Summary

• Marblelous merges smart devices with marble tracks for cool home automation.
• The system triggers automations, smart home actions, and chain reactions with lights, sounds, and movement.
• You can activate different devices by sending emails to the marble dropper, generating QR codes, or using a website button.

Marble runs are really fun. Admittedly, I’m more someone who watches them instead of making them, but they’re still great. However, what if you could set up your smart home so that a marble could set off different devices, like some kind of wild contraption from Wallace and Gromit? Fortunately, the idea may not be so far-fetched, as this Kickstarter project promises to merge smart devices with marble tracks in a cool new design.

The Marblelous is a marble run system that can work with your smart home

This awesome project is called Marblelous, and at first glance, it seems just like a cool technology-enhanced marble run kit. It comes with some cool designs, such as a marble dropper, a lifting wheel, and even a “teleportation system” that makes it look like your marble went through space and time.

That’s pretty cool by itself, but this particular passage caught my eye:

Connect it to your home network or even to the internet and trigger automations, smart home actions, or entire chain reactions with lights, sounds, and movement. Seamlessly links with all Smart-Tricks — built to ignite your imagination and launch your Marblelous experience in style.

While that’s interesting by itself, the company goes on to list the different ways you can set off your marble run:

Directly from the [dropmymarble.com] website

By generating a unique QR code

By sending an email to your unique Dropper address: your_unique_dropper-ID@dropmymarble.com

By placing a button on your own website — the platform even generates the HTML code for you. Super simple!

Okay, so hear me out here. You have a smart home system that automatically fires an email to your marble dropper when it detects a certain condition has been met. The marble then makes its way down the path and sets off different automations as it goes.

After all, the Marblelous comes with a lane-changer device that can send a marble left or right depending on its color or via a decision made in the kit’s app, so you can have it activate different devices depending on certain conditions being met. You could design a system that releases a blue marble when you want the air con turned off and a red one when you want it turned on, then set up the triggers to automatically handle everything when you want to toggle it on or off.

Now you may be wondering why you need a marble race when you can just send a message to your smart home devices manually. There’s a simple answer: marble runs are awesome, and I love the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine that controls the devices around my home. I’m sure our smart home expert, Ayush Pande, would go crazy over this. In the meantime, head over to the Kickstarter page for more details and to pledge if you want to.