How to build NAND gates from Relays

Here's a nice simulation of various logic gates, adders, flipflops and multiplexers built from relays. Click on the inputs on the left to animate the circuits.

Homebrew Relay Computer

Following on from yesterday’s homebrew CPU link, here’s another stunning homebrew machine. But none of that fancy new 74 series stuff for Harry Porter, of Portland State University’s Computer Science Department - oh, no - he’s built his machine from 415 four-pole double throw relays.

Follow the ‘more information’ link and check out the movies and MP3 - they are worth it just for the sound of the machine in action.

Now where did I put that old box of Audions…

Sand Game - Anti-Productivity

Beware! This Sand Game Java applet can waste an awful lot of your time. It’s really a toy rather than a game, and is only limited by your ingenuity. You keep having to go back for one more go, and it keeps surprising - for example I’ve just discovered the Namekuji grows when it gets wet.

The original appears to be at DOFI-BLOG which also has smaller, faster and earlier versions - even a version with little Zombies…

Esoteric Programming Languages

Many thanks to New Scientist magazine’s Feedback for mentioning DangerMouse's collection of esoteric languages and algorithms. They were particularly impressed by the Intelligent Design Sort, though personally I find the Drop Sort more intellectually satisfying.

I now realise that all that time at University writing QuickSorts in Pascal was wasted - I could have been writing Hanoi sorts in Ook!

Incidentally I’m sure that somebody once proposed an extended BASIC that replaced the GOTO with a much more useful COME FROM statement…

Bacteria Gardens

Haven’t got time to weed a full-sized garden, then why not try a Garden in a Petri dish?

Personally I prefer to leave a half-drunk coffee mug sitting on top of the PC. After a few days new and exciting forms of life spring up and start to colonise the drink’s surface. Given a few more weeks, complete civilisations of bacteria will have evolved, looked out at the universe around them and started to develop interplanetary flight.

Design your own CPU

Every time I happen across the 74HCTXXX pin-out page in the Maplin catalogue I get a deep longing to design my own computer from the NAND gates up. Nostalgic dreams of front panels full of flashing lights and rows of toggle switches, of operating systems that fit into Kilobytes rather than Gigabytes swirl before my eyes.

Rather than just dream, Bill Buzbee has designed and built a superbly engineered home brew CPU from about 200 74-series TTL chips. Once you’ve marveled at the details of Magic-1, check out the Links page and the Homebuilt CPU ring.

Strandbeest

Kinetic art on an amazing scale. Watch the videos to get a feel for the size and speed of these amazing wind-powered wandering constructions by Theo Jansen.

Little People

A fascinating project creating and photographing street art on an unexpected scale. I must have walked past “Office Politics” on the way to and from work and didn’t spot it. I can only wonder what I would have done if I had…