Loom!

I’ve been reading an awesome textbook on power-loom engineering, and it’s inspired me to try to build my own all-mechanical, jacquard-style punch card reader. I have a small 3-bit version more-or-less working, and up on thingiverse in case anyone wants to build their own. I doubt it will ever happen, but it would be cool to build a super-simplified all-mechanical computer that actually used punch cards. Maybe I could call it “Plan 2.8” instead? Anyway, eat your heart out steampunk fans!

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To the sea!

A project that’s been on my ‘to-do’ list for years now is some kind of autonomous, robotic boat platform. Although I have dreams of crossing the atlantic someday, for now my sights are set on something more local. To that end, I’ve started construction on a small nautical rover. I unfortunately don’t actually know much about boats or robotics in general, and my primary tools are the laser cutter at NYCResistor and my trusty Thing-o-matic 3D printer, so my boat is kind of funny looking. Some preliminary tests have been promising so far though! The 3D-printed propellers work much better

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It runs!

I really wanted to get this thing up and running for the upcoming interactive art show at NYCR. Behold – the FIBIAC! I’ll do a full write-up for it soon with some more details.

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More progress!

After a tedious afternoon of soldering, I have the three counters needed for this prototype mounted along with corresponding stepper motors and driver circuits. I still need to add a circuit board to the middle layer to connect the upper and lower layers (to connect the counters to both the card reader and the microcontroller used for sequencing). Anyway, a pic of the (rather awkwardly sized) machine so far:

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Progress update on my Cray-1

Despite my lack of website updates, I actually have continued work on my Cray-1 project. In addition to some progress in recovering an operating system for it, I’ll (hopefully) be releasing another hardware update pretty soon. Major new features that seem to be mostly working: – I/O channels! I actually implemented the I/O channel hardware for the Cray-1. Initially I had just been using memory-mapped hardware for everything, but I’d like to actually use that space for memory in the near future, so I took some time to add real DMA hardware. 12 Input and 12 Output channels (I think

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Let there be blogging!

For the last couple of years I’ve just been using my website to host pages about my finished projects (which typically means 2-3 updates a year, at the most). I do a fair amount of work that either 1) never goes anywhere, or 2) is kind of ‘follow-up’ work on some of my projects that might be interesting to some people (as it turns out people actually read this site occasionally – thanks all you people who have e-mailed me!). I have no idea if I’ll do this with any more regularity than I normally update my site, but we’ll

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