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Man Builds 7-foot Grandfather Clock from Lego
Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."
Seems to be /.'ed before the first post even (which I'm sure I'm about to be pipped to).
I remember those awesome lego days of my childhood with huge displays in the big dept stores.... no longer. Seems to be pre-moulded crap these days. Good on him.
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
I'd love to know when the kit for this goes on sale. Of all the large-scale Lego designs I've seen, just once I'd like someone to start selling a kit or at least instructions to built it yourself.
That is by far the best use of legos I've ever seen. I wish I had enough gears in the bins I have tucked away to do something elaboratively creative with that. Though I bet once you get too many in sequence the gears would require more torque than the lego housings can resist.
Just finishing up my end of semester projects, had to analyze several CPUs I designed this semester. One very simple one used 1048 logic cells, but could do integer arithmetic, jumps, branches, and memory operations. Not quite sure how many transistors that translates too, but normally an FPGA cell is a binary operation. Removing several of the odd arithmetic operations would lower that size quite a bit more. I also designed a 5 stage pipelined CPU with 32 word instruction cache, and 32 word data cache in about 2300 logic cells.
When the first vacuum tube based computers were invented, I'll built the designers felt like they were implementing a CPU of this size in Legos. It seems funny now, but this analogy probably holds a lot of water.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
He recently "discovered" a new type of lego brick which allowed a vast improvement in the mechanism. The update is dated 12 March 2003, the original dating from 20 January 2000.
For those of us who work with supercomputers, it still means that. And "how much more power do we need" and "how much cooling do we need" and "there are how-many-thousnad-ethernet-cables?"
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