Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Relay Calculating Engine”.
Um, my name is simon winder, i’m currently in the process of getting my own company going. I used to work at microsoft, research for a long time. Okay, so this is my project. It’S um, the relay calculating engine um. Basically, it’s a machine.
That’S inspired by the old-school computers of the 1920s and 30s, the early days of the computers, and they used relays which are just electromechanical switches in order to do the calculations and i’ve always been inspired and interested in this. Since i was a kid and went to some of the museums in like the technical museum in germany, where they’ve got a whole floor of like really ancient computer systems – and i grew up being interested in this kind of thing, so i was inspired to actually try To build a machine that could do calculations making use of these relays, and one of the things that i like about. It is the fact that you know it. It allows you to see the calculations on a more human scale, because modern computers everything’s very hidden, and it’s all done very rapidly, so you don’t really get to feel what’s happening, but the idea about this is it has a lot of light and noise things changing And you kind of get to see every single thing, you’re kind of watching the thought process as it evolves, so it calculates square roots, um every it has 480 relays and that’s it.
So you know a lot of relays just wired together and each one has a light, and so the idea is, you can dial things in on the phone dial here um and then it displays on the nixie tube display and you can um. It has eight digits. It’S floating point just like a calculator, but it just does square roots. So if i actually run it, you actually get to see all these um relays changing and watch the pattern of lights evolve as it performs that calculation and people have been pretty surprised.
You know i mean i’ve been working on this for six years and they normally when they look around the back of it and they’ll. Look at all the wiring looms and everything like. Oh my god. I can’t believe you did this because it’s kind of a it’s a bit ridiculous and i’m a little bit surprised that i did it myself right as well. My favorite thing about maker faire is that it’s just interesting to see all the new ideas and the new technology that’s coming out and the way that people are just putting things together in novel ways that i haven’t seen before, and it’s really good. It’S a good way of seeing like what’s the current edge of technology happening. You know right now, it’s inspiring well, the advice i give give to young makers is um just go for it because there’s so many tools and so much information out there to do pretty much anything you want. So if you actually dream it, you can pretty much make something that just kind of excites.
Everybody and kind of you know it’s the next big thing so go for it. It’S really what i would say. .