We’ve often said you can make a logic gate out of darn near anything. [The Action Lab] agrees and just released a video showing how he made some logic gates from chains and gears. Along the way, he makes the case that the moving chain is an analog for electric current. The demonstration uses a commercial toy known as Spintronics, but if you are mechanically handy, you could probably devise your own setup using 3D printing or gears.
A spring wound motor is a “battery.” Gears act like resistors and junctions to distribute “current” in multiple directions. Seeing series and parallel resistance as moving chains is pretty entertaining and might help someone new learn those concepts.
A spring acts like a voltmeter, which acts as an indicator. There are also switched gears that act as inputs. While it is possible to make a chained inverter, NAND gate, and NOR gate, it would quickly become unwieldy. But it is, at least in theory, possible.
Of course, there have been mechanical computers of a sort. We’ve often observed that everything is a logic gate if you look at it hard enough.
I find this analogy mildly confusing, could be the overwhelming visual part but this never worked for me.
This is VERY confusing for a novice, the whole series / parallel idea is kind of reversed, and paralleling requires a “junction” aka a differential to make the most basic circuit.
So as a fun toy .. yes, as a toy for learning mechanical systems, yes.
As an analogy for learning electronics? Heck no.
This reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age” wherein the heroine Nell encounters a giant chain-driven Turing machine that she must outwit by means of logic. It’s neat to see an embodiment of the idea outside of fiction.
When the book was written, a logical thinking female alone was enough to make it seem like science fiction. ;)
Makes me think of some of my former math teachers who considered boys to be more logical thinking than girls (old stereotype).
It was the mid 1990s. What kind of place did you live in that was so repressed at that time?
Even in the ’80s women outnumbered men at the universities I attended.
Have you seen computer engineering programs in the USA? They’re still 90-95% male.
The smart women go into biomedical…
90s Germany. Former West-Germany. Some of our teachers had an more, um, classic point of view, still. Or that’s how it looked like, at least.
They still believed that it’s a biological fact that boys are logical thinking and girls emotional thinking, due to hormones and their different brain structures.
Or in biology class, the bio teachers sometimes argued that men in ancient times were strategically thinking hunters
and woman were those emotional, caring, child-bearing beings that lived in social structures with the other females within their tribe, to make food and stuff.
Don’t get this wrong, though!
They didn’t look down on girls/women, really.
Rather contrary, they were always being truely amazed by those girls being good at scientific classes like chemistry, math, IT etc!
As if it was a miracle or something. They tried to support them as best as possible.
An often mentioned popular female figure in math class was Ada, I vaguely recall.
She was being mentioned as an outstanding female who affected math and computing history.
So all in all, it was just a stereotype that was hard to get rid off.
I had to do with WW2, I suppose.
Before WW2, Germany was very progressive in terms of woman rights etc. (1920s Berlin for example).
But in 3rd Reich, the women had to go back to doing household stuff, do kitchen work, get married, raise kids.. It was such a step backwards. Other countries didn’t suffer from this, I suppose.
When WW2 had ended and rebuilding phase had started, this mindset was still deeply stuck within Germany. It needed time to get rid of it.
In East Germany, it was being changed earlier on, I believe, also due to communism and UdSSR.
The social norms were simply very different.
The woman over there had to do men’s work early on and earn their own money, as if it was a normal thing.
They were raised to be “more down to earth”, if you will.
That had caused funny confrontations after reunion in the 90s,
when East Germany woman
and West German woman and had their culture clash.
The discussions in some talk shows in the early days were priceless! :D
Because, those East German woman were being puzzled by all those western beauty nonsense and household tips they had been given.
(Lika a Barby type of person trying to educate a bus driver woman about fancy fashion.)
So the East German woman were essentially being confused and angered like any man would be in such a situation (rightfully!). 😂
That’s what I’ve learned from watching documentaries, at least.
That’s one of those few occasions were I’m fully having empathy with our former East German citizens.
Anyway, it’s not as if West-Germany was stuck in the middle ages, either.
Since 1977, woman were allowed to go to work even if that means that they weren’t able to fulfill all of their duties for family and household as best as possible!
And by the end of the 90s, females even could become helicopter pilots at the Bundeswehr!
Also, by the 80s/90s, a woman working in computing, research, the pharmacy etc or just being an independent single woman wasn’t being unheard of.
Up until that time it wasn’t just so common in the public’s mind yet and the older generation still didn’t know what to make of it.
All in all it wasn’t much different to the USA of the time, I believe. 🤷♂️
It’s mainly just that the stereotype wasn’t being overcome yet at the time.
Girls, being emotional, were considered being good in languages and music, while boys were good at math. And sports, maybe. It was a cliché.
It’s a bit like the old cliché that woman simply can’t drive or park a car properly. 😂
In the 90s, there was also another cliché or stereotype about boys, by the way.
Our teachers genuinely believed that boys can’t be possible as good in languages as girls, because our voice center in the brain is less being developed. No kidding. 🥲
I would outwit the machine with a large steel bar in a very inconvenient location
The serious computers in The Diamond Age were nano rod machines. I would like to see a model of one of those.
Spintronics was featured here on HaD during its Kickstarter phase, too, featuring a Steve Mould video:
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/01/electronics-explained-with-mechanical-devices/
YT has transformed into the hub of infomercials. Yet another influencer paid advertisement. You’ll save a lot of money buying transistors, relays, wires and a meter. And much can be found in the trash. There are many free references online or in video format discussing these concepts in great detail as well.
Well, it might be advanced enough to simulate a C64 processor.
The basic 6502 had about 3500 transistors. Something that could be build using relays or tubes. Why not use rubber bands and gears, too?
Babbage all over again.
Cool, neh… confusing, yes. Educational, hardly, clickbait, perhaps
And then I realized it, wait a minute, this is mentioned earlier here…
Yep, featured on hackaday a year ago:
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/01/electronics-explained-with-mechanical-devices/
Perhaps you have heard of Fluidics? These are logic gates that run on water.
Unfortunately in 2024 climate change killed those.
Hydraulics analogy is among some analogies I usually prefer but this is cool too. Certainly a toy I would want to have when I was a kid.
BTW, mechanical model is a great way to understand transmission line. In particular, “PhET – Wave on a string” is an awesome simulator to demonstrate that a same piece of electrical wire can conduct both mechanical waves and electrical waves in very similar manner.
Can this really be considered a logic gate if the input signals (switches being pressed) are from a different domain than the output (chain moving)?
A real gate would operate chain-to-chain, but I guess the toy set doesn’t have enough pieces for this…
Steve Mould did a video a year ago and he’s not annoying as heck to listen to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY
Universal Logic Gates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate#Universal_logic_gates
Charles Sanders Peirce (during 1880–1881) showed that NOR gates alone (or alternatively NAND gates alone) can be used to reproduce the functions of all the other logic gates, but his work on it was unpublished until 1933. The first published proof was by Henry M. Sheffer in 1913, so the NAND logical operation is sometimes called Sheffer stroke; the logical NOR is sometimes called Peirce’s arrow. Consequently, these gates are sometimes called universal logic gates.