Scandium's latest project: Rubes

A Pair of Rubes turns a simple text message into a delightfully convoluted physical journey. This modular, interactive communications system chains together unconventional transports—blinking lights, sound, mechanical motion, and more—to carry messages from one end to the other. Each matched pair of “Rubes” translates ordinary serial data into its own unusual medium and back again, connecting to the next pair through a simple, inexpensive cable. Users can type a message and follow its progress through a succession of ingenious contraptions before it emerges at its destination, with replies traveling back through the same chain. A shared transmission rate keeps messages moving at roughly human typing speed while allowing individual mechanisms to take their time, buffer data, or carry whole batches at once. Designed to make building a new Rube approachable, the project invites contributions ranging from elegant optical links to gloriously impractical mechanical inventions—creating an expandable, collaborative Rube Goldberg machine that makes digital communication visible, tangible, and fun.

Rube One product concept: an ESP32 inside a transparent enclosure connected to a miniature punched-card conveyor. — Rube One — a product concept with a miniature punched-card conveyor.

Rube One architecture: TRS TX, RX, and ground carry 3.3 V UART at 9600 baud, 8N1 to an ESP32 handling protocol and buffering. It connects directly or through an optional controller to a silly transport limited to 5 bytes per second on average. — Inside Rube One.

Scandium is a project of Sam P. Buck and Daniel M. Drucker, Ph.D.
We're headquartered in Boston.