uncial

5 ms·

1.
by uncial 1y ago
Yeah, I'm not 100% sold on "drive". There's a few competing ideas here -- initially I called it a "loom", but then I wanted to lean more into the analogy of loading a disk, so "drive" kinda won out. I
2.
by uncial 1y ago
That's exactly what I was aiming for! I always thought Turing Tumble was such a cool concept, by why not miniaturise it? Funnily enough I'm currently building out a "Duplo" concept to make roons easier for kids. It'
3.
by uncial 1y ago
So I don't think this specific implementation has practical use cases (someone prove me wrong!), but there's a really really cool general point here-- We've had this technology for centuries. Seriously. This doesn't ne
4.
by uncial 1y ago
I'm absolutely going to need a few hours to properly digest this, but here are my preliminary thoughts: You could almost certainly do a subleq in roons! Tbh it may end up being a practical approach to making a compact full computer --
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by uncial 1y ago
Thank you! Yeah, I was trying to lean into the idea of "shrink yourself down into a computer and physically manipulate the bits", think it's the best way to understand what computers are actually doing. Spintronics is really
6.
by uncial 1y ago
With the FDM-printed prototype version there's a noticeable "a mechanism is occuring" sound, largely due to layer lines. Tbh it's not too loud rn but I'm confident we can get it smooth and whisper-quiet using any va
7.
by uncial 1y ago
That sounds like the right general category, but maybe not specific enough? We could call it an Uticus Key and see if we can get the name to stick, that might be funny. (Thanks for the kind words!)
8.
by uncial 1y ago
Yes, fantastic question! 10x10 is actually way more than we need -- don't know the minimum but I suspect 2x2 is possible. The interactive tutorials sketch out an approach to this. My instinct is to use SAM with timers for memory/p
9.
by uncial 1y ago
Absolutely yes! I prototyped a hopper peripheral that doubled as marble storage. It hooked into the gear grid and used the rotation to drive a helical lift to carry the marbles up to the surface, where they'd enter the edge of an adjac
10.
by uncial 1y ago
I'm grateful to Rockwell for their excellent research, but I think they really dropped the ball on side fumbling -- any competitive encabulator in 2025 really needs to be using bifurcated resonance.
11.
by uncial 1y ago
Thanks! Glad to hear the simulator was worthwhile, took me ages to hack it into shape. I did actually experiment with adding markings on the edges of the path roons, so that when you put them together, the "phantom channel" become
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Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit(whomtech.com)
203 points by uncial 1y ago|30 comments