We improvised a marble elevator with some lego technique and regular legos, for a duplos marble run we had around.

This is an improved design, with paddles at 100 degree or so, which improves throughput by almost 4x (can't do 90 degrees exactly because paddles would collide).

Nice design

how many marbles do you have?

I want to see it at max marble capacity

moar marbles!

Very cool. Next: a mechanical, turing complete computer. Don‘t show to @ID_AA_Carmack, he‘ll port Doom for it.

@ID_AA_Carmack Those little triangular bumps are effectively diodes. From there to BJT and from there to flipflop is not a lot journey. As a kid I used gravity (also a diode) to make a basic adder with pipes.

Wow! Cool!

Would alternating the phases of the rotors increase throughput?

Tried, but they clash, they are too close. Only have 0, 90, 180 and 270 degree phases available because of the axis grooves - we can't do something fancy like interleaving at 60 degrees.