Show HN: Mechanical Computer Kit (Roons)

Summary

binary adder computing 14+7=21 (01110+00111=10101) Welcome, weary traveller from the orange site! Let me tell you the tale of roons — a kit for building mechanical computers. VIDEO I got inspired a couple of years ago when I binged a bunch of mechanical logic gate YouTube videos. There are some unbelievably clever implementations — Steve Mould’s water computer was a particular inspiration. Still, these mechanical logic gates usually end up too big to make any practical devices. I figured, how hard can it be to miniaturise them into a usable kit? foreshadowingVery! It turned out the answer was very hard. loom automaton The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. Ada Lovelace After noodling around with far too many prototypes, I settled on what I call a loom automaton. We place tiles (“roons”) on a loom of alternating bars that move up and down. The contours on these tiles guide marbles and holes in discretised steps, representing bitstreams. xor gate, composed of a turn + switch + distributor Isn’t it incredibly neat that a literal physical loom turns out to be a great substrate for Lovelace’s metaphorical loom? Anyway — you can think of this loom as a cellular automaton, where each cell is: Occupied or empty Raised or lowered Controlled by one of a finite set of roons If you know of prior work on this kind of system, please get in touch! I don’t claim the loom automaton is original; I just haven’t seen it elsewhere. why loom good Initially, I was making ad-hoc devices for each computer component — a gadget for number comparison, which worked like this; and a gadget for addition, which worked like that; etc. The loom was a turning point. Instead of a loose collection of dissimilar gadgets that plug in together, everything is implemented on the loom. (Except peripherals, which we’ll get to later.) This gives us a common interface for stitching together whatever devices we need — memory, instruction sets, whateve...