The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer

An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever been sitting there, quietly computing something and thinking to yourself, 'If only this process were somehow billions of times slower, less reliable, and involved lots of physical labor?' If so, the Turbo Entabulator is the machine you've been looking for! It's a (nearly-entirely) 3D-printed mechanical computer. With three single-digit counters for memory, it's driven by a hand-cranked, Jacquard-style punch card reader. You can even download the files and build your own."

Comments

Re:Good for teaching ...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The same can be said for any number of things. There is something to actually being able to see and touch something and being able to figure out how it works. This is why I spent the weekend with my 4 year old building a working automatic transmission with planetary and ring gears out of Legos. He became curious about how one worked after seeing a book about Lego machines at the library and made the connection between Lego gears shown in it and gears in a vehicle transmission. So he wanted me to build him one and show him how it works. Granted it doesn't have clutch packs (components are locked using shafts), torque converter, or a valve body (you move the shafts to lock components manually), but it does show how the gearing works. It has 3 forward speeds, neutral, park, and reverse, just like old standard 3 speed automatics did.