[HN Gopher] Show HN: Exhibit and Site on Mechanisms for Students
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Show HN: Exhibit and Site on Mechanisms for Students
Just finished a super-nerdy amateur hobby project: An exhibit and
website to show kids how cool mechanisms are! Sadly, kids don't
get much tangible experience with machines anymore. Ideally, this
exhibit will inspire some to explore engineering, even if they are
not "book learners". The website provides content to back up the
exhibit, with videos and 3D printing files. The project is
inspired by engineering exhibits from the past. Check out the
research page for more. The project will be open-sourced to enable
people to make their own and extend it. If you want to collaborate,
LMK. --Steve
Author : sturbes
Score : 22 points
Date : 2025-05-02 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mechanical-library.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mechanical-library.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Somewhat related (different project) _Understand 1,700 Mechanical
| Linkages with These Helpful Animations_ (315 points, 10 years
| ago, 65 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10067743
| sturbes wrote:
| YES! he is the OG of these animations.
|
| There are also cool sites like https://507movements.com
|
| In some ways we are all building from the same source material.
| I put as much of the historical resources into this custom
| research page https://mechanical-library.org/mechanical-
| wonderland
| 7373737373 wrote:
| One problem I haven't found a mechanical solution for yet is how
| one could (simply) implement a state transition table - for a
| specific example say you have 9 states each mapping to one of 9
| other states, and many-to one mappings are possible:
| 1 -> 2 2 -> 9 3 -> 1 4 -> 6 5 -> 2
| 6 -> 6 7 -> 1 8 -> 8 9 -> 9
|
| (This is the 3rd of 4 transition tables for an 8-state, 4-symbol
| Universal Turing Machine. These transitions apply if the 3rd
| symbol is read from tape at the current head position - with all
| 4 transition tables implemented you could select between them
| depending on the read symbol. 9 is the halt state.)
|
| The mechanism should remain in one state and then go to the next
| as indicated by the table, repeatedly. How would you mechanically
| implement this? A face cam with many grooves perhaps, starting
| and ending at different angles? https://i.imgur.com/aNPBcdh.png -
| while always moving a follower from the center of the wheel
| through the groove to its edge, with something like a
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_lambda_linkage, so the
| wheel stops at the next angle representing the current state?
|
| The fact that there does not seem to exist a simple answer for
| even this seems to partially explain why mechanical computers
| were quickly given up on.
| sturbes wrote:
| This is above my expertise, might be a better comment for this
| post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859464
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