Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit

This is really really cool! The physicality of it is special and can be a huge help with some people to gain an understanding of whats actually happening on the micro scale. Reminds me very much of "Spintronics", a game that holds a special place in my heart as I could teach a traditionally conceptual topic to my kids.

Are the designs you've come up with 3D printed? I feel like there's a huge possibility of community advancement into this ecosystem (fully appreciating you should make a return on all of your time and creativity).

Thanks again for sharing something so cool.

uncial · 9 months 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 wonderful, not just for its cleverness (which is extreme) but also the total concept and aesthetics -- absolutely something I'm aspiring to.

And yeah these are all 3D printed. Agree with your sentiments around community stuff, I don't have any fixed ideas there but I would be absolutely delighted to see how people can build on this. There are so many possible physical cellular automata to explore; this is just one.

cuken · 9 months ago

If you ever open up the designs or want another set of eyes to print on some other devices / take a crack at generating new components, please let me know (looking forward to the kickstarter).

that is awesome, how do you see this evolving for practical use cases? Is it just for education and experimentation, or could something like this scale for more complex tasks?

uncial · 9 months 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 need transistors or clever materials. Mechanically, it's much less complicated than what (say) 18th century clockmakers were doing -- it's just bars going up and down!

So if you'd asked me 200+ years ago, I'd say: this device can compute nautical charts, calculate differential equations, and some third incredibly useful thing. Nowadays we can do all that much better with silicon etc, and I don't see this competing practically on that playing field...

... but I think it's useful mental technology to notice that there were simple ways to perform arbitrary computations, accessible much earlier on in the tech tree, that sort of got skipped for some reason. So while roons is probably siloed to education/experimentation/fun, I really hope it inspires someone to go -- what else are we missing?

uticus · 9 months ago

> ...the gears have a layer of phase baffles (I don’t know the technical term). These physically block the gears from connecting until they’re perfectly synced up...

perhaps the correct term is "key" [0]? only thing i could find to contribute to this masterful project, by pointing out unimportant details like this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_(engineering)

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!)

btw love the about page

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robbles · 9 months ago

This is incredible, love how much further you've taken it than just the proof of concept as well.

This is probably just my opinion, but I kept thinking that a better word for "drive" given the domain would be "clock". It's basically a binary clock signal driving these, right? Maybe "clock drive"?

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 get the feeling there's some word in the vicinity of "clock" that I'm missing. Something like "metronome", "pulse", "synchronizer" etc -- because you're right, the (primary) purpose of the drive is to deliver phase information to the disks. Drawing a bit of a blank tho.

(Thank you for the feedback and encouragement!)

jackpirate · 9 months ago

As a CS prof, I'd love to have this in my office for students to play with. Looks awesome!

smoyer · 9 months ago

If the "Turing Tumble" was Duplos, this is moving up to Legos!

https://store.upperstory.com/products/turing-tumble

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's a disk with double-thickness bars (so a 4x4 grid instead of 8x8) but that loads directly onto the standard disk drive, so everything stays compatible. Still a WIP tho!

sneha_tamal · 9 months ago

proaralyst · 9 months ago

This is cool! The simulator was useful for understanding what was going on, I hadn't realised until I watched a few that the roons can push marbles out in between squares.

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" becomes visible. Ended up looking pretty cluttered though so I scrapped it.