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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

This is from the same person (team?) that made Turing Tumble, which has been great fun to do with my 8 year old. The puzzles are a lot of fun and gives a nice intuitive feel for “circuits” and basic mechanical logic ( ands, ors, counters, etc) computation.

Highly recommended if you’ve got a kid in your life who likes figuring out and building things. https://www.turingtumble.com/

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Yes, this is from the same person. Turing Tumble is almost amazing. Unfortunately, gears and balls used there are not reliable enough and more complex circuits have abysmal reproducibility (~50%).

I tried it with my kids and they were very excited up until this unreliability killed all the fun. I wish Turing Tumble had a premium version with a better determinism.

Sounds like a pretty authentic engineering experience then.

Yes. But kids like to be exposed to the joy of engineering first. It's otherwise hard for them to justify the pain that's required to get to the joy of success.

Did you try putting the little “high-friction washers” on the gear pieces?

Sadly, by the time I discovered the community improvements / hacks, my kids lost all the interest.

Hopefully, Spintronics would be more reliable, given that the author is well aware of the unreliability issue with Turing Tumble.

They shipped the little washers in the box, with the recommendation to use them when connecting 2 gear bits, but leave them off when connecting 3 gear bits.

My impression is that the main design flaw with Turing Tumble is the steep board angle, and it would have worked a bit better if designed for a 45° (or something) board. That and using heavier rotating parts with a bit higher moment of inertia. But I think it’s still great despite the occasional malfunctioning part.

As for frustrated kids: I think interaction with an adult who could notice parts sometimes malfunctioning (and correct them on the spot) would probably help forestall some frustration. But my kid is only 4.5 so we have to do the puzzles together.

They didn't ship with mine! :)

Probably, an update to a later version. I don't know?

Where can I find the community hacks?

https://community.turingtumble.com/

Specific thread that I had read at the time is https://community.turingtumble.com/t/crossovers-dont-work-or...

While my memory is fuzzy, it was indeed crossovers which caused majority of undeterminism, at least in the set I had. There are some alternative 3d-printable implementations if you walk by the links there. I didn't try.

Same thing happened to me with Digi-comp II, although I was the kid and I thought that I had screwed up the assembly. The model printed on the cover had wooden bars and looked a lot more reliable, but the production model was plastic and not reliable at all.

I love Turing Tumble but I’ve had to create a list of which specific parts can’t be placed on which specific pegs, and thus when we use it have to carefully keep track of everything like a bomb defusal squad. Still love it.

My year old 12 son enjoyed Turing Tumble and quickly got much better at it than me. He would look slightly pityingly at me when it was clear I could see the solution as fast as he could. We didn't really have major issues with reproducability/reliability. Lots of cases the small balls falling on the floor though!

Every time I see stuff like this, it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".

If/when technology switches over to the micro-mechanical, we'll suddenly all be scrambling to re-introduce a generation to this 1800s-era mechanical design stuff...

I'm not sure it will, though, except in specific cases.

For now, it looks like the progress has mostly been:

    mechanical -> electrical -> optical (/RF)

For good reason too: reliability, integration, and energy efficiency. We're a bit stuck on electrical for now as integration is slightly better, electrons being smaller than photons, and it seems to be more suited for power transmission and conversion, at least for now.

Basic principles haven't changed much though, and it's always interesting to understand those. There is just the "field" concept that can be tough to understand.

Given the recent work to design a 'clockwork' rover for Venus exploration[0] I could see some utility for mechanical circuits in harsh environments like Venus, or helping in the event of a nuclear meltdown like Fukashima Daishi, or other environments particularly antagonistic to electronics.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27164195

> If/when technology switches over to the micro-mechanical, we'll suddenly all be scrambling to re-introduce a generation to this 1800s-era mechanical design stuff...

Probably not. Micromechanics is completely different from larger scale mechanics, the kinds of problems you have to solve and the tools you have to solve them are often completely turned on their head.

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