I would suggest to pgboswell that it may be interesting to reach out to a few local professors who teach introductory circuits at some nearby universit(y/ies) and do an in-person demo of the components. You may find you have a significant educational market you could tap into. I could well believe there's a lot of people who just never quite make it over the abstraction gap to understand circuits who would be able to follow them if they could physically interact with a mechanical circuit running at human orders of magnitude.
This is from the same person (team?) that made Turing Tumble, which has been great fun to do with my 8 year old.
The puzzles are a lot of fun and gives a nice intuitive feel for “circuits” and basic mechanical logic ( ands, ors, counters, etc) computation.
Highly recommended if you’ve got a kid in your life who likes figuring out and building things. https://www.turingtumble.com/
Yes, this is from the same person. Turing Tumble is almost amazing. Unfortunately, gears and balls used there are not reliable enough and more complex circuits have abysmal reproducibility (~50%).
I tried it with my kids and they were very excited up until this unreliability killed all the fun. I wish Turing Tumble had a premium version with a better determinism.
Yes. But kids like to be exposed to the joy of engineering first. It's otherwise hard for them to justify the pain that's required to get to the joy of success.
They shipped the little washers in the box, with the recommendation to use them when connecting 2 gear bits, but leave them off when connecting 3 gear bits.
My impression is that the main design flaw with Turing Tumble is the steep board angle, and it would have worked a bit better if designed for a 45° (or something) board. That and using heavier rotating parts with a bit higher moment of inertia. But I think it’s still great despite the occasional malfunctioning part.
As for frustrated kids: I think interaction with an adult who could notice parts sometimes malfunctioning (and correct them on the spot) would probably help forestall some frustration. But my kid is only 4.5 so we have to do the puzzles together.
While my memory is fuzzy, it was indeed crossovers which caused majority of undeterminism, at least in the set I had. There are some alternative 3d-printable implementations if you walk by the links there. I didn't try.
I love Turing Tumble but I’ve had to create a list of which specific parts can’t be placed on which specific pegs, and thus when we use it have to carefully keep track of everything like a bomb defusal squad. Still love it.
My year old 12 son enjoyed Turing Tumble and quickly got much better at it than me. He would look slightly pityingly at me when it was clear I could see the solution as fast as he could. We didn't really have major issues with reproducability/reliability. Lots of cases the small balls falling on the floor though!
Same thing happened to me with Digi-comp II, although I was the kid and I thought that I had screwed up the assembly. The model printed on the cover had wooden bars and looked a lot more reliable, but the production model was plastic and not reliable at all.
Every time I see stuff like this, it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".
If/when technology switches over to the micro-mechanical, we'll suddenly all be scrambling to re-introduce a generation to this 1800s-era mechanical design stuff...
Given the recent work to design a 'clockwork' rover for Venus exploration[0] I could see some utility for mechanical circuits in harsh environments like Venus, or helping in the event of a nuclear meltdown like Fukashima Daishi, or other environments particularly antagonistic to electronics.
> If/when technology switches over to the micro-mechanical, we'll suddenly all be scrambling to re-introduce a generation to this 1800s-era mechanical design stuff...
Probably not. Micromechanics is completely different from larger scale mechanics, the kinds of problems you have to solve and the tools you have to solve them are often completely turned on their head.
I'm not sure it will, though, except in specific cases.
For now, it looks like the progress has mostly been:
mechanical -> electrical -> optical (/RF)
For good reason too: reliability, integration, and energy efficiency. We're a bit stuck on electrical for now as integration is slightly better, electrons being smaller than photons, and it seems to be more suited for power transmission and conversion, at least for now.
Basic principles haven't changed much though, and it's always interesting to understand those. There is just the "field" concept that can be tough to understand.
I took four years of engineering in university and work in software now, and one gif on your page made inductors click intuitively for me in a way that so many courses did not -- thank you!
In my fifties, I finally figured out that the INTEGRAL constuitive relations for inductors and capacitors were much more fundamental than the differential ones. Solved virtually all understanding problems for me.
Is there a word or a phrase for this learning phenomenon? When someone is suddenly able to fully understand a concept that has been explained to them before but, for whatever reason, they just didn’t quite “get” it?
I just pledged! My 67 year old mother got me Turing Tumble for Christmas and we worked through the first half of the puzzle book together. It was so nice to be able to explain to her what I do for a living with actual physical switches and marbles. I recommend it to everyone and anyone who will listen.
Really amazing work, well done! Having something like this when growing up would've made electronics so much more accessible.
I can't think of anyone I know close to me that would really appreciate this gift, so I'm with another comment on here that gifting it online somehow would be something I'm interested in. I'd feel happy knowing I'm supporting a great product and helping the less fortunate of the younger generation get better access to fun educational tools.
Quick question: I noticed a Form 3 in the video. How much of the prototyping did you do on it?
Also, I wish there were a pledge level where I'd buy one kit for me, and anonymously gift one to any random kid in another part of the world who wants one but can't afford it (kind of like OLPC did).
You know, I don't recommend a Form 3 except in unusual circumstances. It's labor intensive, messy, and expensive. The resin itself is expensive, but then you also have to buy expensive new resin trays frequently because they wear out fast. I used it a lot when I was finalizing the 3D models to get them ready to send off to get injection molds started. The precision of a resin printer was critical. If I were you, I'd use a service like i.materialise.com instead. The prices are low for resin prints and they're pretty fast to ship, too.
That's a great idea with the anonymous donation. If anyone is looking for a great place to donate, one really cool program is the Turing Trust. It's run by Alan Turing's great nephew, James Turing. He's awesome and he does amazing work. Here's their website: https://turingtrust.co.uk/
I'm wondering if you'd be willing to expand on why you chose this mechanical, spinning metaphor for electronics vs some other metaphor?
Most of the popular electronics books I've seen use a water or fluid metaphor to describe how components work (eg the fantastic Practical Electronics for Inventors).
Not at all intending to be critical with my question, just curious.
As a non-electrical engineer who dabbles in electronics, I'm excited for your work to help others learn and happy I can back it!
Yeah, good question. My first attempts were with fluids: water and air. Water doesn't work very well because there's a lot of resistance to flow unless the pipes are large in diameter. It's not practical for anything but the simplest of circuits. So I went with air for a long time before I realized it had no chance, either - when it compresses and decompresses, it heats and cools, and that energy is lost to the surroundings. It makes horribly inefficient circuits. It's also hard to seal moving parts without adding an unacceptable amount of friction. And finally, you still can't see air moving through a circuit.
So I stepped back and thought about how to do it mechanically. But the hardest part of a mechanical circuit is the absolute simplest part in electronics: the junction. That is, where electricity flows in one wire and splits along two wires. How do you make chain or a belt split? Not only that, but it has to follow Kirchoff's law: the sum of currents leaving the junction must equal the current entering the junction. I finally realized that's what a differential gear arrangement does, and planetary gears are a sort of differential arrangement that would work perfectly for this. It was very, very hard to make the mechanical junction so that it had low resistance while under load, but I eventually got it. Once I had that, I knew it would all work.
Seems a great idea. I did a physics degree and never 'got' electronics (Voltage, Capacitance etc) at an intuitive level in the same way that I did mechanics (Force, Mass etc).
BTW We got Turing Tumble for my son and he really enjoyed it.
I am glad to see that they are using LEGO Technic chains (https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3711) , and therefore the gear pitches are LEGO compatible (at least with the non-bevel gears, but the traditional spur gears). I am excited about the potential of interacting with existing Technic parts!
There are two possible mechanical analogies to electrical circuits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical%E2%80%93electrical_...). In domains (electrical, acoustic, thermal, mechanical, ...) there are two kinds of quantities, sometimes called "across" (voltage, temperature difference, ...) and "through" (current, heat, ...).
My first guess was that the analogy here appears to be velocity is voltage and force is current, but I think I have that backwards. The battery, which I was taking to be a ideally a voltage source without internal resistance, appears to be a constant-torque mechanical device. Connecting it in series to different resistances means it spins at different speeds (different current is drawn).
But the battery will also spin if it's not connected to anything... so I'm struggling to keep the analogy straight while thinking about how these parts behave ideally and non-ideally.
Looking at the ammeter, it's definitely velocity = current.
Edit: and finally direct evidence
> But the most practical place for [ground] to be is anywhere there is zero force (i.e., voltage) on the chain.
Interesting, I'm curious why this analogy was chosen, and not the other way around. Current as torque and voltage as (rotational) velocity would seem to allow the junctions to be much simpler -- just a gang of gears on a single axle, rather than the differential mechanism used here -- since torques (like current) add at an axle/junction, while rotational velocity (like voltage) transmits through an axle/junction.
Edit: I suppose a/the major reason is to get the resistance = friction analogy down. With current as torque, friction acts as conductance. E.g., a constant-torque/"current" motor would need to be held still (high friction) to prevent its speed/"voltage" from growing, whereas with the equivalent electrical circuit, you need to short the terminals (low resistance) of a current source to do the same.
I suppose the reason for this seeming discrepancy is that, in an electric circuit, wires are separated by high resistance. But in a physical circuit, "wires" are separated by low friction (= not touching). Flipping around the natural behavior of a junction allows you to take the dual of the entire circuit, thus causing the behavior of resistance and friction to line up.
All natural systems are spring+damper. That means they're effected in the same way by a difference in potential (spring) and also resistance to rate (damper).
This isn't so much analogies, more that the physics of natural systems means they're governed by 2nd order differential equations, so really do behave the same.
More importantly, they're all forms of energy and transferable. Power=IV=Fv=TO=PQ.
I don't think I understand the point you are making. Power = product of two quantities. You have these two quantities in various domains: I and V, F and v, T and O, P and Q, ...
The analogizing comes from saying "I is like P and V is like Q", or vice versa.
2nd order ODEs are very common, and I agree that it is unifying to see different systems modeled by the same equation. But I think more fundamental than that is the understanding of "through" and "across" variables, the notion of a "port" [1], and series/parallel toplogies for combining two one-port components to form a new one-port component.
You could still make an analogy between domains, even if you don't have second-order ODEs. This is clear even from your comment because, note that a spring+damper is going to be a first-order ODE. You would need moving mass to store kinetic energy, in addition to the spring to store potential energy.
When you choose to call one spintronic component a capacitor and another a inductor, you've determined which of the two analogies is the correct one. You could swap the names for the components, and you would swap which analogy is correct.
The heading seemed contradictory to me with both "spintronics" and "mechanical" in it until I realised that it is not the other sprintronics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics).
Yes I and pedantically bothered by the fact that it isn't really about spintronics nor electronics, but rather mechanical engineering and merely co-opting a more marketable term... that said I'll still buy a copy for my kids. Already playing LaserMaze with them. Even if they don't end up in stem I hope it helps in their A levels one day. https://www.thinkfun.com/products/laser-maze/
In high school I took electronics and learned enough about capacitors, inductors and transistors to design and test simple circuits. I'd gotten a Radio Shack "100-in-1" kit when I was in fifth grade, but the projects within were all opaque recipes to me. Most circuits had illustrations with cartoons components saying things like "I'm the capacitor, and I give a little 'kick' to the transistor!". I remember being kind of surprised at just how un-enlightening these cartoons were. If I followed the wiring steps for a project and then it didn't work, I'd double-check my wiring. If it still didn't work, there was nothing further to do; I just gave up. I had no idea how it 'ought' to work, so there was nothing I could measure or verify that would mean anything to me.
This is what I wish I'd had at the time. I'd have understood intuitively what each of the components did. The time-scale is slowed down enough that I could see what was going on. I could build and test in stages and see how each new change affects the outcome. Endless experimentation and possibilities...
I personally find it quite refreshing to see accessible hardware projects showing up once again. The ensuing discussions are full of nuggets and somewhat esoteric recommendations that always draws me down the rabbit hole where I end up discovering a lot of things I wish I could visualize when I was much younger.
This reminds me of when I was taking an advanced circuit design class. The analog circuit in question had many moving parts, and I just didn't have the intuition. The teaching fellow at the time thought it would help to visualize a mechanical analog (ha!) of the circuit and drew for me a complex mechanical diagram. It was so complex that I found it more intuitive to just study the electrical circuit directly.
After years of working with electrical circuits, I now often find it easier to translate a mechanical system in question to an analogous electrical system and analyze it. In fact this is where the phrase "analog electronics" comes from: It is an analogue of a real world (often mechanical) system. At the end of the day, these are all (mostly second order) differential equations.
I was a backer for their previous project: Turing Tumble. It was a very positive experience, with timely informative updates and ultimately a high quality product.
I've always been curious how far we could push "mechanical computation." Seems like even an operation as simple as multiplication requires tons of metal. If I wanted to compute, say, a SHA2 hash or an Ed25519 signature with zero electricity, would I need a room-sized machine?
For sure - at least with the parts in their current form. A simple flip-flop takes up a minimum space of about 30 cm x 30 cm. But I wonder how small these parts could get. Like, what if spintronics was invented in the 19th century instead of the 21st century? Would Moore's law have applied to mechanical transistors?
Since I just now learned about that link, I haven't read the book to know, but I have always been interested in finding out if the ability to create smaller and smaller machines is possible by having an outer machine which manufactures an inner, smaller, copy of itself, apply the process of induction, define the termination criteria, ..., profit!
Or, maybe I'm thinking about the problem all wrong -- it's not the actual construction machinery that's the problem, it's providing the input materials to each step (gears, levers, fasteners, wiring(?), etc)
There's a Factorio-clone hiding in this problem ...
The issue is that scaling does not produce linear effects as you go down (or up) for a number of reasons. What works at the meter scale doesn’t work at the millimeter scale, which doesn’t work at the micrometer scale, etc.
So you end up having to learn an experiment at a more and more difficult to access scale to figure out how to make something actually work.
the reality is that it turned out to be easier to make things with lithography, and we don't need to pantograph our way to the bottom (whew!).
Many cell phones now have sensors that are mems-based, built using lithography (accelerometers being the best example). In many senses, we've started to achieve the goals of the book.
I did enjoy Diamond Age, maybe I should reread it! It was the first time I had ever heard of "reversible computing" and (ahem) I still don't understand it, but it's good to know such a thing exists
I'm about 175 pages into that PDF and am now sorry that I drew attention to it. I was beguiled by the name recognition and the snazzy title, but I find the text filled with hand-wavery and aspirational thinking, and it also seems to focus a lot more on DNA than I would have expected
I also find even their aspirations suspicious that any such machinery could ever possibly exist to just tweezer atoms around like marbles and voila gold from lead!
> I also find even their aspirations suspicious that any such machinery could ever possibly exist to just tweezer atoms around like marbles
We can already push atoms around with macro-scale actuators that have nano-scale accuracy (which is clumsy, to be sure), and there is little doubt that the hardware to do so will get smaller and more capable over time.
Thanks for the recommendation.
That cover though, is that topology specific to a coronavirus or do more viruses share it? Especially since the Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna vaccines deploy nano-particles for delivering their payload.
I was blown away (no pun intended) by the mechanical analog computers used fire control systems on battle ships:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/gears...
This was 3000 pounds for calculating a shell trajectory (with a good number of parameters).
If you could build mechanisms atom-by-atom, you could make reversible mechanical computers that are orders of magnitude faster than what we have today.
Rod logic will not be faster than electronic computers. According to Drexler's thesis, it's reasonable to expect "that RISC machines implemented with this technology base can achieve clock speeds of ~ 1 GHz, executing instructions at ~ 1000 MIPS."
This is because the speed of sound, which limits how fast mechanical signals can propagate, is much lower than the speed of light.
The main advantages of rod logic is that its compact and power efficient. The aforementioned CPU would consume ~100 nW.
Really the reason why Drexler analyzed rod logic in the first place is that it was easy to analyze and something that his proposed assemblers could plausibly construct, better alternatives for fast computing may exist.
> This is true, but it's important to consider that you could squeeze several billion of these processors into the space taken up by current CPUs.
You're implying that parallelization can make up for the slower clock speeds, which is true but only for some workloads, and then the system is constrained by bandwidth to get instructions and data to the parallel cores as fast as possible.
Sorry that HN's software rate limited your account! New accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions, and it always makes me sad when a project creator shows up and gets hit by those (I'm a mod here). That's not at all a case that we're trying to restrict!
I've marked your account legit so this will not happen to you again, and I've approved your comments that got throttled, so they're up now. Welcome to HN and congratulations on this exceedingly cool work.
seeing that nynx hinted at reversible computing, they would just be smaller and more energy efficient. The idea being that you can cram more of these in a given volume.
Reversible computing tries not to destroy information, allowing to go under Laundauer's limit [1].
When you discard the previous value held by your flip-flop, you clear the output bit, returning electrons (or a chain displacement) to the power supply. If you can instead repurpose that energy, you'll have to supply a lot less energy since you'll dissipate less. That would be reversible or adiabatic computing [2]. I have to note that processors these days are mostly power-limited, trying not to melt themselves as the energy flux inside a chip approaches that of a nuclear reactor. Just look at modern sockets and count the pins dedicated to power supply![3]
Building at the molecular scale you can achieve extremely low friction coefficients in the moving parts. Inertia also gets extremely low, and material strengths tend toward their theoretical values.
Of course electronics aren't standing still, but resistance tends to get harder to deal with as feature sizes decrease.
What I've always wondered is that wouldn't very tiny molecular mechanisms get problems with "accidental welding" since a part could be permanently destroyed by a few molecular bonds forming or breaking and (IMHO - this is my guess/assumption) such events would be likely at e.g. room temperature.
Unless designed well, yes. Parts that move relative to each other need to be designed so that unwanted bonds are unlikely to form. This generally means designing them so that unwanted bonds are less energetically favorable than the bonds they start out with. Of course, as temperature rises, the chance of breaking existing bonds rises, as does the chance of forming new unwanted bonds.
You can hold a mechanical calculator in your hand, so I imagine if an industry of effort on perfecting mechanical computation, it could get quite small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta
I wonder if you could make a torque amplifier[0] with the transistors? A torque amplifier is a mechanical device which takes in a shaft rotation and power outputting the same rotation angle except with higher torque.
This was an important component in mechanical computers to amplify outputs disc integrators which outputted shaft rotations at low torque.
It might be a fun device to make because you could use this to make part of a steampunk exoskeleton where the user can turn a small arm to move a much large arm. Because torque is amplified it will be easier to move the heavier arm.
I'd imagine that would have to be possible, seeing as the junctions function as differentials. It might be as simple as adding negative feedback to the input of the transistor, though we'll probably need to wait for spintronics to be shipped to find out for sure.
That seems to be where physical computing (pulleys, etc) always falls down—no amplifier. So the system needs to be input with more and more energy, the more gates there are.
To the founder’s point about math not being necessary for developing intuition about electronics: Michael Faraday’s three volume treatise on electromagnetism, which essentially created the entire scientific field, has essentially zero math in it.
This is amazing and looks fun! I immediately paid to support the project, so I can play the toy later.
That said, I wonder if it will really make learning circuit easier. I have a hard time imagining that kids would give up learning circuit just because they couldn't get the abstractions. The biggest obstacle to learning, per my limited observation of course, is always lack of innate curiosity or sometimes talent. Those who get discouraged by the so-called difficult abstraction probably do not need to learn circuitry in the first place.
By the way, I find the promotional video interesting. There are a few frames that talk about how a kid had to resort to maths and what not to understand circuits, and videos showed kids checking out oscilloscopes, square waves, some complex circuits that looked like Y-delta transforms, and voltage-ampere curves (or something like that). I mean, if a kid would look into those things, why would we worry that the kid can't learn circuit? And since when looking into math is a bad thing?
Boswell's idea seems aligned with the movement of progressive math education in the US, which advocates that there's gotta be an easy and intuitive way to motivate and enable every kid to discover and grasp math concepts. I think it's a noble goal. I'm just not sure if everyone is born with the drive or aptitude.
I teach and from my experience drive and aptitude is not the problem. "Math" and "abstraction" are not the problem either, except that for many educators they are synonymous with rote memorization which leads to ridiculous amounts of math phobia in the US that I have not seen in Europe.
When you hear people avoiding math in teaching, they usually mean avoiding the rote "non beautiful" perversion of math frequently presented by educators with limited math experience.
You'd think the water analogy would be easier to build and sell. Regardless, the more "analogies" the better, as the abstract concept reveals itself more readily.
When I was taking physics, the water analogy of circuitry helped me out a lot, especially with regards to capacitors and inductors. Inductors being like a water wheel, taking time to ramp up to speed then reinforcing flow of current (as I remember?). And capacitors being like a rubber sheet separating water. A strong current provokes a respective force against the water on the other side and slowly stretches the rubber until current stops; the key thing is it requires constant voltage to keep the rubber stretched; the elastic energy of the rubber is analogous to the stored electric field in a capacitor (?).
Physics was hardest for me... I preferred the more structural and compositional nature of computer science. Things changing continuously is hard for my brain :(
I'm amazed at all the ways we can simulate circuits. The classic is pipes and water, however you can also use car traffic, heat transfer, and now gears!
My question is can you simulate how resistors behave in series versus parallel? How about capacitors?
Yup. I actually tried making an analog of electronics with water and air first. Water didn't work very well because of the high resistance. Air didn't work very well because of it's compressibility - each time it compresses and decompresses, there's serious hysteresis and you lose a ton of energy.The trickiest part to make in a mechanical version is the simplest part in electronics - the junction: Where one wire splits into two wires. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do that with anything besides a fluid or a gas. Fortunately, planetary gear systems do the trick. Once I got that working, everything fell into place. Using a junction, you can easily make parallel circuits. Capacitors are just torsion springs in the spintronics model.
This looks really cool. Would be interested myself even if I am probably outside the intended age bracket.
I can't help think that the parts look really flimsy based on the videos. They look kind of 3d printed and the plastic seems cheap. Hope that's not the case.
Mechanical inductors, capacitors, and even transistors? That's and incredible feat. Developing intuition about how to put the components together to build something like an oscillator or a flip flop is a must for electronics enthusiasts.
This is great! I didnt even know there were mechanical analogs to electronic parts. This is going to make electronic teaching an awful lot mote intuitive!
The USA should start teaching electronics in third grade, and through high school. Don't even grade the kids. I think it's more important ever for kids to know.
I pick third grade only because I was thinking about kids safety. I don't know when kids stop swallows stuff these days.
I wonder why they don't start teaching kids important stuff early on, like; mechanics, finance, starting a business (profitable lemonade stand, and how ridiculous a permit is technically needed to operate, building residences. I for one colored to many maps, and memorized who Ecuador produces.
I think in the USA electronics couldn't be taught in grade school is the shortage of teachers who barely understand electricity, and math now, but that would change eventually?
I just pictured a dad from the future telling 13 year old Opie to fix the Tesla in Dan Akroyd voice. "Opie, but you learned how to properly dischge a capacitor in Miss Orliey's class?"
Maybe just reading, writing, and arithmetic after all that?
These are used, for example, in avia and rocket engines - in first or independent contours of their control systems. Such logic devices are very reliable, relatively simple and can work at extreme temperatures.
Agreed, it's an unfortunate namespace collision. Spintronics is a really cool area of physics, with decades of research.
Electrons have spin. Although 'classical semiconductors' exploit the electron's spin via the Fermi-Dirac distribution in transistors, the actual sign / direction of the 'spin' is ignored in everyday electronics. Making use of this available spin degree-of-freedom opens up a whole wealth of new possibilities.
Spintronics has already revolutionized certain industries (eg, GMR in magnetic hard drives), and there are further open areas of research (eg, spin as qubit basis states in quantum computers).
Intrinsic angular momentum is weirder than intrinsic mass because you can take it out and put it back in - although for most particles you're not allowed to have zero. But you are allowed to take 1 from an electron to go from 1/2 to -1/2. If that is not enough, you can go back from -1/2 to 1/2 by changing your basis vectors. ;)
Further - paired electrons can collectively form the spin-zero singlet state, or spin-one triplet state. In either case the two electrons, which are fermions independently, together act like a boson (eg, Cooper Pairs in a Superconductor).
Addition of quantum angular momentum is really weird.
I would suggest to pgboswell that it may be interesting to reach out to a few local professors who teach introductory circuits at some nearby universit(y/ies) and do an in-person demo of the components. You may find you have a significant educational market you could tap into. I could well believe there's a lot of people who just never quite make it over the abstraction gap to understand circuits who would be able to follow them if they could physically interact with a mechanical circuit running at human orders of magnitude.