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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.
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
.. a Bionicle cluster of these ...
and projected power decimated."
A spokesman said Steve would only use the white bits of Lego.
MirrorDot appears to be down at the moment. In the meantime I mirrored it here. Unfortunately my web host isn't that generous so I'll probably take it down very shortly. Those that want to mirror the mirror can grab a zip file copy here
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.
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.
Yeah, most "hacks" are indeed pointless. That doesn't make them any less fun.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
If you mean software to simulate building digital circuits out of gates, look at TKGate.
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..."
Someone should make a Lego computer, and then run a CAD program on it, just for irony's sake.
I'd be happy with an BF interpreter made out of Lego...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
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
For ECL, the situation is the opposite, since here everything is mostly transistor stages connected in parallel, as well as generally available true and complementary outputs, so the NOR or OR functions are the most common. Add another transistor in parallel for each additional input, and outputs can be tied together in some cases, forming more OR-functionality. With inversions, the necessary AND and NAND functions may be generated as per DeMorgans theorem.
The situation for NMOS, PMOS and RTL are similar to the one for ECL: transistors in parallel for the basic NOR function are generally preferred to transistors in series for the NAND function.
In CMOS circuits, NAND and NOR are about the same in complexity, it is a matter of parallel-connecting the P-channel transistors and series-connecting the N-channel transistors for a NAND function, and vice versa for the NOR function.
Here is some information about the internal connections of RTL, DTL, TTL, ECL and CMOS circuits.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
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.
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.
It's still cool though.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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!
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.
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