Rodulator
Behold, two sides for the casing of a bit slice, cut using the Trotec laser cutter into 1/2″ plywood. I wonder if wood is strong enough? If so, I could save a lot of money, since acrylic is much more expensive than wood. And wood can be stained to look 19th century The slots are [...]
Continue reading about Wooden casing for Logical Engine bit slice
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’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, [...]
Went to Maker Faire NYC today, to exhibit Logical Engine No. 1. It will still be there tomorrow, Sunday September 26. (The sign says: Towards a Steam-Powered Logical Engine. Charles Babbage, FRS and George Boole present Logical Engine No. 1. A Demonstration Model shewing the Principle of Logical Calculations by means of the Movements and [...]
A laudable goal. John Graham-Cumming exhorts the building of an Analytical Engine, just as Difference Engine No. 2 was built in the 1980s.
Continue reading about An effort to build a replica Analytical Engine
So now that I’ve had a chance to think long and hard about the design of the arithmetic logic unit, or Logical Mill as Babbage would have called it, I realized that I had several errors in the previous discussion. I also reorganized the Mill to make it possible to increase the number of bits [...]
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