Collaborate Disseminate
Venus hasn’t received nearly the same attention from space programs as Mars, largely due to its exceedingly hostile environment. Most electronics wouldn’t survive the 462 °C heat, never mind the …read more Continue reading Clockwork Rover For Venus
It can be surprisingly hard to find decent analogies when you’re teaching electronics basics. The water flow analogy, for instance, is decent for explaining Ohm’s law, but it breaks down …read more Continue reading Electronics Explained with Mechanical Devices
Before graphic calculators and microcomputers, plotting functions were generally achieved by hand. However, there were mechanical graphing tools, too. With the help of a laser cutter, it’s even possible to make your own!
The build in question is nicknamed the Harmonic Analyzer. It can be used to draw functions created …read more
Continue reading Harmonic Analyzer Does It With Cranks And Gears
Ubiquitous computing has delivered a world in which there seem to be few devices left that no longer contain a microprocessor of some sort. Thus should a student wish to learn about the inner workings of a computer they can easily do so from a multitude of devices. For an …read more
Continue reading Teach Computing The Old-School Way With A Digi-Comp II
Today, if you want to teach kids the art of counting to one, you’re going to drag out a computer or an iPad. Install Scratch. Break out an Arduino, or something. This is high technology to solve the simple problem of teaching ANDs and ORs, counting to 0x0F, and very basic algorithms.
At the Vintage Computer Festival East this year, System Source, proprietors of a fantastic museum of not-quite-computing equipment brought out a few of their best exhibits. These include mechanical calculators, toys from the 60s, and analog computers that are today more at home in a CS departments’ storage …read more
Continue reading VCF East: Before There Was Arduino, We Had Balls
Here at VCF, we stumbled across a gigantic contraption that spanned several tables. Rube Goldberg machine this was not. Instead, this device actually does something useful! [Tim Robinson’s] differential analyzer can solve differential equations through several stages of mechanical integrators. The result is a pen-plot graph of the solution to the input equation, input by displacing a rod as a function of time.
Differential analyzers have been around for over a century. [Tim’s] claim to fame is that this particular DA is constructed entirely from Meccano-branded parts. We’re thrilled to see Meccano, over 100 years old at this point, continue …read more
Continue reading Differential Analyzer Cranks out Math like a Champ at VCF 2016
We were doing our daily harvest of YouTube for fresh hacks when we stumbled on a video that eventually led us to this conversion of a 1980s Armatron robot to steam power.
The video in question was of [The 8-bit Guy] doing a small restoration of a 1984 Radio Shack Armatron toy. Expecting a mess of wiring we were absolutely surprised to discover that the internals of the arm were all mechanical with only a single electric motor. Perhaps the motors were more expensive back then?
The arm is driven by a Sarlacc Pit of planetary gears. These in turn …read more
Continue reading 1980s Toy Robot Arm Converted To Steam And Other Explorations