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Lego Logic Gates
Thud457 writes "LEGO Logic Gates - It's like Babbage, but with bricks. All the gates except XOR are here, and he goes on to develop a clocked flip-flop. While practical mechanical computers may be out, even at the nanotechnological scale, nanomechanical memory may be in. "
can one create robots with these or is it only to create simple electronic circuits ?
I guess these could be combined with mindstorm, couldn't these ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
'Tis but a small step to a 64-bit processor with 2 MB of cache. Of course, the bricks might burn up upon power-up, but it's a small price to pay!
XOR can be constructed by combining other gates. You acctually just need NAND-gates to be able to create any other gate or larger structure.
One question though will they run my fav. flavour of Linux? (assuming you can build a computer with these)
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
Can it play .Ogg files?
... just as long as we don't get a little lego man instead of that bloody paperclip I don't really care
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Let us know when theres a NetBSD for it so we can build a LegoLAN
Way to go on getting your news from posts in past discussions!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
There may be no obvious immediate use for mechanical analogs of digital circuits, when digital circuits are orders of maginitude faster than mechanical circuits, but dismissing the idea out of hand reminds me of old scientists telling the newspaper that "There's no need for flying machines here!"
Besides, a steam-powered computer would be really fun to build!
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
Next, CmdrTaco will build a duplicate article out of Dupe-lo blocks!
Vote for global prefs bug
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Before you read on, if you have had trouble accessing this page then please accept my apologies. The previous bandwidth issues should be solved now that I have a new server.
"The previous bandwidth issues should be solved now that I have a new server"
Not for long.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
For your sig: "Ad" is short for advertisement, not "Add", unless I'm missing some sort of joke here.
But... But you are me !! Look, we have the same name !!!
-- Anonymous
Not that I could have read the article and worked that one out.
On the simplest scale you only need or and not gates.
A not gate can be constructed with one transistor and an or gate with two diodes.
It would be nice to see a modern day version of an old valve computer, build from transistors and diodes not ic's.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Well , kind of inevitable really.
That is, until /. arrived....5:30am and the site's already running slow. How much longer you think it will hold up?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
It's quite clever how you can do this mechanically. It's a reminder of the old mechanical code-breaker computers. However, imagine trying to make a 'pocket' calculator out of these. It would be massive. Computers the size of rooms again...
Someone should make a Lego computer, and then run a CAD program on it, just for irony's sake.
Programmers never get old.. They just can't C as well.
.. a Bionicle cluster of these ...
and projected power decimated."
A spokesman said Steve would only use the white bits of Lego.
The road to hell is paved with NAND gates.
/usr/bin/fortune
--
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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How long will we have to put up with this LEGO monopoly? Will Megablox answer this challenge? That upstart Knex, perhaps?
Back in my day we had to build our mechanical analogs of digital circuits out of Tinkertoys! And we liked it! What's this new fangled "plastic" stuff anyway. Wood! that's the way to go.
On a slightly more serious note: If we had built some of these in my CS3?? class instead of just diagraming them on paper I might have paid more attention. But I doubt it.
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
I would love to play with logic gates like these. Trying to create early computers, or just a simple "addition machine" with a series of logic games would be of immense intellectual interest.
*But* physical stuff is a pain; has anyone put together a program that allows me to simulate basic electronic gates, and "build" these things. It would help me understand a lot better how computers' internal logic work.
Thanks,
Robert
--- My dad's political betting
At how many (K)hz will this thing operate when it's finished? How many FLOPS will it achieve? Could you overclock it by adding oliveoil to the gears?
Have a look - it's identical.
Maybe the author submitted to two sites?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
So, how does he address the issue of fan out? As far as I can tell, if changing an input will cause a computer built from mechanical lego to do N transitions, then the mechanical force for all these N transitions would have to be applied at the input.
This doesn't scale and will hit the limits very soon.
Someone, look if you dare but mod that Troll.
There is much friction inherent in these, and as shown, no "gain stages" to overcome these losses. So the "fan-out" would be appalling as implemented here. This would preclude their use to build anything other than the simplest logic constructs. However, I think it would not be too hard to add "gain stages" to act as "buffers", which could, for example, use falling weights to act as "supply rails" to increase "fan-out", thereby facilitating construction of far more complex circuits. Martin
"Absorbing your worst..."
As another poster mentioned, there's no gain in these devices, so after a few stages of friction loss and imperfections in the mechanisms, the whole thing will lock up. Electronic gates have inherent gain, and thus are resistant to noise and slight differences between gates.
Another problem is the way his clock works -- the clock has to go to zero before the set or clear bits can change. This won't happen in a real circuit -- generally everything changes just after the clock rises. One solution is some sort of two-phase system, where alternate flip flops use the rising and falling clocks, but I'm not sure how much this would limit the circuits you can build.
He mentions that "It is possible to build an edge detector for the clock signal. It requires a few more NAND gates. The advantage of doing this is that it no longer matters when the clock signal goes back to 0 and the indeterminant state is avoided." But I want to see it in action before I believe it.
Giving the gates gain may be possible, too, but it would require powering each gate, either with electrical power or some sort of funky mechanical setup.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Have a look:n kertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/Ti
rmathew.com
Try to combine some and make a binary clock, instead of some old grandfather clock.
I would wear it !
Brings to mind the book, "Souls in the New Machine" by Sean McMullen. (http://www.sfsite.com/08a/soul62.htm) Don't want to say more without SPOILERS, but it envisions a computer in the future where processing elements are slaves, and there's a darned good reason why it's not electronic.
Also on the fringe, one story from "Tales of the Flying Mountains" by Poul Anderson. The computering technology on a warship is TEMM - Thermionic Emission Micro Miniaturized, selected for its radiation hardness. It turns out that when you microminiaturize, you don't even need thermionic emission. Take a look at FEDs - Field Emission Devices.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Cog wheels? Rack and pinion? Totally overengineered.
Ok, off the head design .... (I'll have to get some Lego).
1) Rotateing axle power input into gate, with medium cog rotateing freely...
2) Axle for logical output... with medium sized cog near to power input cog, but not connected
3) Power input is coupled to logic output via fairly loose rubber band - output will turn in unison with power input, with no other parts added.... both input/output cogs will be turning same direction
4) Add one logical input.... This will be connected via rubber band to a mechanism to shove a cog inbetween the power input, and output cogs, engaging, and forceing the output axle to reverse, as cog drive will not slip unlike the rubber band drive. If the logical input is rotateing one way, the cog will engage, If the input rotates in other direction, cog will be pulled from between power input, and output, and so both will rotate in unison again
5). Second logical input added in same way.
Damn, I'm getting some lego now, to try it out!!!
He could build a Lego vacuum-cleaner made of Lego, but that's like canabalism. Before he knew it, he'd have a Legoid-lifeform eating his other projects and growing stronger.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My wife's 1881 pump-organ has a patent for its arrangement of knobs that control the various sound-modifying apertures. They didnt have names for these concepts at the time, but looking it over with a modern eye, one can see it includes AND gates, OR gates, and open-collector wired-OR pullups, all made out of wooden rods and leather straps.
Why not drive the clock at various stages and take some power out of it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
here are some nice pictures of Hillis' tinker toy tic tac toe machine...It predates his work on the Connection Machine and Thinking Machines Inc.
Goes to show you how strong the mind can become with a little exerecise in logic. Other posters are right about how limited the potential circuits are with lossy elements but all the the same, kudos to Lego for hoping that at least some of us consider thinking a form of recreation.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Electrical gates have an inherent gain in that they all use transistors, with the inputs to the gate being inputs to the transistors, and the outputs of the gate being whether or not the transistors flip on, allowing power to come from a power source to the output of the gate. This is why electrical gates all require an always on power input, sort of thing. But it avoids the whole friction/power loss problem.
If he built a switch (kinda like a transistor) out of LEGO and then used a motor to provide the power to the mechanical action of the devices, he could avoid the problem he's having with the lack of gain on the devices (after 3 or 4 devices in a row, the whole mechanism stops due to wobble room). But then it would be partly electrical, I grant you, since you gotta have a powered input of some type.
With some cleverness about arrangement, you could make the whole setup only require one motor, although using two or three would be more likely for ease of construction.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If Lego really are building a system called Quatro, might they not run into trouble with Quadro - the system that lets you build your own climbing frames, slides and other life-size kit?
I think that starting from logic gates to accomplish things in Lego is a waste. There are usually more legoish ways to do the same thing.
EG, when I was very young I assembled a LEGO calculator that would compute simple additions; unfortunately I do not remember how it worked, but I am pretty sure it did not use gates (at the time I did not know what gates where, I did not even know what " digital" meant).
ps: if you do not believe me, ask confirmation to my parents: they are the ones bragging this memory around; I personally had at a certain point completely forgotten the Lego calculator.
before I read the Fine Web Page in Google's cache, was a logic board with individual gates housed on standard lego pieces. You'd build your circuit by placing the lego pieces on a lego board.
I'm not sure how the traces between the pieces would work, but legoCAD would be fun, like those 10-in-1 electronics kits from Radio Slack.
sigs, as if you care.
Sorry, but Kerry Labs already patented that.
I think you're supposed to send him a pair of numbers, and he'll put the total in his signature.
Wake me up when the obligatory Linux installation has completed.
you haven't priced Lego's what? that's a possessive apostrophe.
/.ers to grasp?
they're called "Lego" or "Lego bricks" if you must, but not "Legos" and certainly not "Lego's".
Lego. Plural and singular. Same f*cking word! Why is this so hard for
with just 48 million of those and 165 million Square Miles we could make a model of a Pentium 4...
The only question left is what is the kinetic force needed to run a single cycle through or 165 million square mile processor?
damn, can't post annonymously!!!!
Yeah, I was being a smartass. It's still cool though.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If QM effects come into play at a certain threshold of scale, do both mechanical and electronic implementations of the same gates give the same results under QM? That would be weird.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's still cool though.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Number of logic gates in UNIVAC XXXX Number of legos needed for UNIVAC XXXX Being able to outsource to preschools Priceless Or something like that.
It looks like a great idea, but you'll notice that there are no movies. It is because only certain state changes will work. There is no clear way for it to go from an output of 1 back to an output of zero:
Take a look at the And gate: 0 * 0 = 0: Notice that you can see through the section between the yellow cross-bar and the gear slides. This is because there needs to be some play in the system between the 0*0 and 0*1 cases. It is clear from the photos that the gear slides are *pushing* the crossbar forward, so that when both inputs are forward, the output will be one. The question is, what pulls the crossbar back? Is there a hidden rubberband? Some magical force? Or did they not consider the case of the transition from 1*1=1 to 0*0=0?
I could very well be missing something (frankly, I hope I am missing something, this seems like far too obvious a thing for the designer to miss). Without a better picture of the design, I can't see what it would be, can somebody fill me in?
You can fix that by using the logic result to open/close an air/steam valve. That way the value remains at a "constant" level depending on the air/steam pressure.
The work depicted in TFA seems awfully similar to the rod logic found in Neal Stephenson's book Diamond Age. This begs the question, is Neal a prophet? Has he foretold the future? Will I be getting my pizza in thirty minutes or else the Mafia comes and apologizes personally?
Only time will tell. Until then, I have to thank this lego-builder for making my life more interesting. Now I know what I'm gonna do for Christmas, play with Legos and make logic gates!
Lord, I'm such a geek.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
If nothing else perhaps the the submission page should contain a "source" field. It may be too much to ask the editors to catch this sort of thing (seems they can't even eliminate dups from their own site; sigh) but a quick look at the more popular geek sites (automated or otherwise) might be in order.
Merlin.
With electronic computers, binary makes sense. A capacitor is either charged, or not charged. A transistor is either conducting, or not conducting. It's HARD to make electronic devices with some fixed number of states other than two (let's disregard analog computation, with its infinite number of states, for now).
Yeah, this thing is like Babbage's machine in the sense that it computes mechanically, but Babbage's machine wasn't binary. It's EASY to make multi-state mechanical devices.
We shouldn't let our current computer technology make us too narrow-minded when designing new computer technologies. Binary representation is no Holy Grail, it's merely a convenience in the world of semiconductor electronics.
I found a new device, the vacum tube, to be about 60% cheaper and faster than Legos. They are gonna make me rich, I tell ya, rich!
Table-ized A.I.
before. On BBSPOT.com, about a month ago. I'm way too lazy to look it up, but if anyone else wants to/remembers go for it
K Man
When I was a kid back in the 60's, I had a toy mechanical computer called 'Digicomp'. It was a funky conglomeration of springs-and-rods-and-plastic-things that you built from a kit, and programmed it by putting little pieces of tube over various tabs to affect the flip-flops.
To operate it, you pushed a sliding thing in and out (a clock cycle). You could add and subtract and multiply and divide in binary, albeit rather small numbers. Hard to describe this thing, but it was very cool!
Actually, the following year I got Digicomp II for Christmas, which ran by letting a stream of marbles flow through it by gravity, and these marbles toggled the flip-flops. Very cool again!
These toys came with excellent little books on Boolean Algebra, and sure taught me a lot about the interface between binary math and physical things. I felt right at home when I started programming 6502's and Z-80's in machine language back in the day...
Are these things, or anything like them, still around?
- sgage
Yeah, flip-flops and latches and things are clocked.
But an AND or OR gate doesn't take a clock, nor need a clock. Except for propagation delay, the output is always indicative of the input.
Nothing. I'm very shocked.
...
howaboutabeowulfclusterof ZAP! ^D
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
A device could be built with lots of small "force amps" around it, as the initial force disipates through the system, it could be boosted.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You could pre-set RAM memory. Looks like you forgot your circuitry class.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actualy, you can calculate the speed of the thing by figuring the speed that the compression of the rod is transfered through it. If you're pushing it fast enough, the rod will act more like a spring then a rod, assuming it dosn't melt or catch fire or something.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Who don't you sue?
And how about building the model airplane? That's pretty safe.
The post made me think of something like this...
Hmm, I guess the kid might glue his mouth shut or huff the glue. Guess we'll have to sue Borden or something.
The U.S. is now officially a culture that slaps "Warning: HOT" on coffee cups. We have now trumped Douglas Adams' toothpick.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
..ever heard of a pendulum?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Didn't Spock build a time machine out of Legos at some point? Or was it Wesley Crusher?
Well if they didn't they should have.
This is old news. At least a month old. Actually, I can't get rid of a feeling that this was already published right here, on Slashdot.
The degradation is pretty easy to handle: just add an elastic and cam such that the output rod tends to "snap" from 0 to 1.
There is more than one set of gates that is "logically complete". That means that you can use gates from that set to synthesise any others that may be needed. Simple examples are "and", "or", and "not" and "nand". The nand set is particularly elegant since you only need one type of gate, althogh of course you may need examples with many different numbers of inputs. You can use a karnaugh map to find an implementation that would use "and" and "or" (and "not") and then substitute nand gates for all of the and and or, and it will work just fine. Since nand was a simple and economical gate in TTL, this was a very practical approach way back then. (A nand gate in TTL was built around a single multiple emitter transistor.)
I think these are wonderful. Talk about a brilliant way to get 9 and 10 year olds interested in the basic concepts of computing. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to have to be buying bulk brick packs soon...
Nice job!
-Styopa
This reminds me of the analog computers thay were used for about 1/2 of the last century. They caculated tables etc. Mostly balistic problems.
I like the idea of binary and Lego. Is very intersting.
Basically, when you are implementing mechanical adding machines (and even logic) - ultimately you need to overcome friction. You wouldn't believe the lengths to which Babbage (and his engineer/draftsman Clement) went to overcome this issue. Litterally months and years were spent on this problem - and the designs which came out of the work were very beautiful (especially the spiral carry mechanism).
Push-pull logic has this same issue, too - I believe Konrad Zuse had to come up with some interesting designs on his mechanical machines as well.
Another issue with gear-based mechanisms is that of tooth lash - that is, the small amount of movement between the teeth as the gears mesh - this slight amount of movement can cause premature wear and failure, excess friction, and inaccuracy - this too, was something Babbage had to work very hard at overcomming in his systems, and came up with a very elegant locking mechanism for his machines.
Interestingly enough, friction played a large part in the various differential analyzers created in the early part of the 20th century - knife edge wheels rotating on glass discs. Very tough to transmit the miniscule torque - what was done was a form of servo mechanism/mechanical assist with motors - very similar to that of power steering in an automobile. Even so, it wasn't enough, and these systems tended to get "out of tune" and produce wrong answers at a whim, or at least inaccurate results. However, they were a little more forgiving, being an analog system (and, interestingly, they drove a two-axis pen plotter which drew a graph to show the progress/answer to the simulation being run)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Pendulum wouldn't work without a weight of some sort attached to it to override the friction incurred from the motion of the machine. Same as an old grandfather clock, sort of thing. You gotta have that falling weight to keep the pendulum in motion or eventually the clock stops from friction losses.
But yeah, a pendulum hooked up to a gear with a dropping weight, same as in one of those old clocks, could provide back and forth horizontal motion. It could also act as a clock input if needed, and eliminate some design problems. It'd cause other problems though, I'm sure.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There are enthusiasts at the "friendsofdigicomp" Yahoo! Group. They have a couple of emulators, pdfs of the docs, some info about the original designers (and the patents), and a guy who fabs replacement parts.
The various Digicomps and related toys show up on eBay periodically.
- htf