Half-Baked Projects
Based on the plan in the previous post, I have completed and tested the spiral cam drive. First, I cut to size some aluminum round stock on the lathe, and drilled a 3/4-inch hole through, also on the lathe, for the Acme rod. This became my blank. Next, I wrote a program to generate GCode [...]
Continue reading about Completed: Spiral cam drive, intermodule connectivity
Here’s video showing the new drive. It’s sooooo much easier to move. Next will be attaching a bearing to the drive bar, and milling a fusee to push against the bearing. I have high hopes for this design! Improved 16-rod drive test from Robert Baruch on Vimeo.
Here I put together 14 rods, 4 of them having stronger springs, because I ran out of the weaker springs, so I think this is probably equivalent to 16 rods. This is the maximum that the Logical Engine should use. 16-rod drive test from Robert Baruch on Vimeo. A lot of force was required, and [...]
Here’s the cam drive which sequences the drive bars in the right order. And here’s a video showing how it works: Springs will return the drive bars – I had to move the bars myself (and one of them just dropped because of gravity).
Here’s an explanation of how I implemented noise margins for the Logical Engine design. Recall that rods have holes for bumps every 0.3125 inches (5/16″), and that the spacing between rods is 1/2″ vertically and 0.625 (5/8″) horizontally. Also, I am using 1/4″ hex standoffs that have the following measurements: Here’s a setup which [...]
I decided to try a drive bar 16 rods long, since that is the maximum size of a module in the 16-bit Logical Mill. I milled the drive bar on the CNC mill, made a few small rods, and disabled the springs to check the alignment and smoothness. Here I’m using an experimental video script, [...]
Having drawn my idea for a layer drive, I went to NextFab, cut the casing parts out of acrylic on the laser cutter, wrote a quick gcode program to produce the brass pieces on the CNC mill, and put it together. Twice, because the first time I learned some things, and the second time I [...]
Here is a drawing I put together in Google Sketchup showing my idea for the module drive: Each rod has a spring which tries to pull it in. If the brass bar shown on the right side is slid to the left, then the rod will pull in if it can. Pushing the bar back [...]
I have the logic for a 16-bit Logical Mill worked out and verified. Now, I have calculated that a 16-bit Logical Mill will require approximately 1,200 rods, and 5,500 bumps. The average rod is approximately 13 inches long, thus the total length of rods would be somewhere around 1,300 feet. That is about USD 500, [...]
Apparently the open source compute game Minecraft is suitable for building asynchronous logic circuits (thanks, Dan Reetz for finding this). Links to videos: A 16-bit ALU by “theinternetftw” A 16-bit adder by “Redshift64″ A 4-bit counter by “Drayhok” Redstone circuits at the Minecraft Wiki Redstone simulator by “Baezon”
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