Author: admin

I had gotten bogged down with the data recovery effort from my COS disk pack in the last year (and my day job building slightly more modern supercomputers got a bit busier), but an awesome programmer named Andras has picked up the torch and carried it ridiculously far! He not only re-wrote all of my disk recovery software to overcome most of the disk corruption, he also reverse engineered the file system and wrote a simulator for an entire data center’s worth of equipment (4 CPU Cray X-MP, with 4 IO Processors, a peripheral expander, printer, wyse 50 terminals, a

My efforts have slowly been converging on a workable design for a 3D-printable, all-mechanical computer (with an emphasis on the word *slowly*). Inspired by this recent post I saw floating around the ‘net, I thought I would post my most recent attempt at building a fully-mechanical stepping mechanism (to replace the stepper motors used in my FIBIAC project). Eventually I will get around to integrating this with my electromechanical counter so that I have a fully mechanical counting mechanism. And video!  

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!

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

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.

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:

I finally feel like I’m starting to make some progress on this electromechanical computer project. Behold! My prototype electromechanical punch card reader!  

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

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