The entire website is incredible. Good find, Colin.
What I don't understand why this is not sold as constructor toy sets? There's a lack of simple interesting educational toys for 5+ year-olds. These are just a perfect fit. Just look at the combination lock [1] or the Hui Game toy [2], for example. What kid wouldn't want to have this? I would buy a good half of these creations in a jiffy.
† Assuming they are well made and reasonably priced (under $100).
I have mostly completed an "Horologium" and then intend to finish the simple perpetual calendar. The "Celestial Mechanical Calendar and Orrery" is more of a retirement project, with nothing to compare against its hard to tell that its about four feet wide by two feet tall, full of cams and gears.
I tend to cheat and cut my axles outta brass on my metal lathe, but the projects "officially" can be built completely out of wood.
It turns out from personal experience that its pretty easy and fast to cut wooden gears to shape, but a real puzzler to sand them and finishing is a huge problem because most finishes look nice but gum up the works if any gets on the contact area of the teeth. From the outside the challenges simplistically look to be reversed.
Folks in an "electronic" business like this need a "non-electronic" hobby and butchering wood is more or less mine at this time, although I mostly make furniture not clocks. If you're willing to follow the rabbit hole deep enough, woodworking turns out to be about as deep as computer science. If you think you know everything there is to know about woodworking, you probably don't know much about woodworking. Ham radio is like that too.
> If you're willing to follow the rabbit hole deep enough, woodworking turns out to be about as deep as computer science. If you think you know everything there is to know about woodworking, you probably don't know much about woodworking.
Every once in awhile, I throw up my hands at my computer and tell myself that I'm going to quit and become a carpenter, instead.
LOL there's a difference between woodworking and being a carpenter. Probably 90% of carpenters build cookie cutter houses same thing every day. On the other hand there's probably not very many people in the whole world who know what ornamental turning and geometric chucks are, much less actually do it.
One wood supply shop nearby me is apparently haunted by people who make wood pens. That's it. They just make really cool looking homemade pens. They have tons of gear and parts and supplies specifically for that kind of work.
Another example, there's a guy named Roy Underhill who's been doing mostly traditional jointery on a PBS show continuously since 1979. Over 400 episodes and still going. 200 hours just of one obscure historical corner of woodworking.
Then there's carving, pyrography aka woodburning...
Rather than ambitionlessness I use it to avoid thinking about a problem for awhile when I get stuck. Not pure procrastination, but there's a whole class of bugs that can only be identified by a fresh mind and the longer you stare the less likely you'll see it unless you take a break. Donno if I should be encouraged or discouraged by all the furniture (and scrap wood) I've made.
Matthias (the author of woodgears.ca) sells a very handy app for designing various types of gear, available from http://woodgears.ca/gear/index.html (there's an online flash version, but I've had troubles getting it to work properly in the past)
One of the other contributors, Ronald Walters[1] has done a lot of stuff towards wooden clocks, as well as an impressive planetary gear set[2]
After a fw years you can slowly build any shape with the right instructions. You can never get to the point where you can quickly build any shape and designs are infinite. Add to that a rediculis number of materials, tools and people get really good at some odd things.
Which is the cool thing about 3D printers you basically get to skip directly to the design side of things while ignoring how long it takes to build.
Thanks for posting this. I've been showing the video from woodgears.ca to my classes for some time now, and despite having spent a fair amount of time on Evilmadscientist, I'd never noticed the Digi-Comp.
Its pretty awesome, I played with one at the Maker Faire in San Mateo and the rhythms of the marbles clicking were fascinating! At some point I am going to need to record that and put it into a music track.
This is possibly the best way to introduce the fundamentals of computer science to a really young kid I've seen. I'm even thinking of trying to simulate one...
Anyone got any recommendations for js physics / animation libraries?
Even if you ignore the binary adding part, looking a the behavior of a single gate is a fantastic, concrete example of what a flip/flop is and how it functions.
Five would be 4 and 1... since those are numbers that can be represented by a binary "marble" in the right position, and each of those positions has a slot in the machine.
So you put a marble into 4 and 1 slots, and let them drop to store a "5" in the register. Then you put another into the 4 slot and let it drop, it clears the marble already in 4 through the drop-chute, flipping the flip-flop and pushing the new marble up from 4 slot to the 8, and you very simply get 9 which is 8 and 1.
What I don't understand why this is not sold as constructor toy sets? There's a lack of simple interesting educational toys for 5+ year-olds. These are just a perfect fit. Just look at the combination lock [1] or the Hui Game toy [2], for example. What kid wouldn't want to have this? I would buy a good half of these creations in a jiffy.
† Assuming they are well made and reasonably priced (under $100).
[1] http://woodgears.ca/combolock/index.html
[2] http://woodgears.ca/hui/index.html