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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. "
'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!
I just realised : this doesn't use electricity, it's some mechanical representation of these electronic devices.
I however think this still could be used in non electrical devices (quote any "infernal machine" here, like the one that get triggered after Indiana Jones picks a statuette)...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
... 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
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!
Have you seen the size of these things? Putting them in any kind of robot would be kinda stupid.
:)
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet...made out of lego.."
I think you'd have more luck with the nano versions of these gates. But good luck trying eh
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
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
Have a look - it's identical.
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..."
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.
I for one welcome our new EMP proof lego robot overlords.
!hoD
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