The Analog Thing: An open source, educational, low-cost modern analog computer
the-analog-thing.org
the-analog-thing.org
Digital has been cool and interesting, but when young hackers have the tools and incentives to become de-facto physicists, they're going to tear holes in the fabric of reality. This is such a cool product.
Can you speak to similarities between them? You seem to know a bit about both topics.
The intent was to create some generative music, and seeing if I could use it to create 1/f noise, and exploring self-similarity using a musical ear instead of in code. Still working on it.
When you look at what you can do with magnets hooked to a synth with a ferrofluid, e.g. https://youtu.be/Q3oItpVa9fs , the sound and your ear helps to develop an sense for what kinds of waves can be used to yield physical effects. If you can functionally suspend and maipulate a ferrofluid with waves, there are likely analogies to laser pulses and electrons for quantum computing. Waves gonna wave, etc.
The other piece that grabbed me recently was "analog fractals," (https://hackaday.com/tag/analog-fractals/ + that rabbit hole) where if you can get those artifacts instantaneously as the effect of physical feedback instead of rendering them computationally, there are likely faster functional approaches to a lot of other problems, only a subset of which we use ASICs and FPGAs to implement today.
It's speculative based on laughably incomplete understandings on my part, but that's hacking.
Every so often when Matlab or Simulink won't integrate something simple, probably because of something I did, I wish I had an analog computer to compare to.
Some care is needed to get something that works across a wide temperature range, and avoids being easy to overwhelm with outside noise sources, but it's a problem with lots of existing solutions.
I can imagine a lot of practical pitfalls and awkward half-solutions to trying to do an analog monte carlo; I was wondering how the OP went about it.
As usual, you have a Wiener process and thus need Gaussian noise. Yipeng Huang found that some noise stemming from a resistor ladder of the chip provided Gaussian white noise and he could control the mean by feeding it with a DAC and he also had some way to control the variance by changing some multipliers (but I can't tell you exactly how that worked). Nevertheless, this was the analog part and he faced issues with DC drift. Alternatively, he looked into generating the noise digitally with a microcontroller.
It would be much more practical if the analog components could be configured digitally through a script, so that multiple programs could be constructed and run on the same compute platform. A hybrid platform of sorts.
They also don't cost $350 a pop.
Slightly less mainstream, there is the concept of FPAA (field programmable analog array), which is the equivalent of an FPGA but for analog instead of digital.
E.g. see https://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp.
This is basically the reality of every musician making music with guitar pedals and modular synthesizers. And the answer is, yes, you physically make the thing you want. Once you're done with it, you tear it down to make the next thing. That's part of the magic.
It's like building something out of LEGOs. If you want to re-use the pieces, you need to take apart your creation.
Perhaps a more interesting question is to ponder why an artist might not want that flexibility. How does it affect their creative process when in order to make a new sound the old one must be destroyed? Are there positives to that workflow?
kind of like moving an AVR chip from one breadboard to another
You're not doing the same tasks as a digital computer though.
Paper is more secure than digital computing.
Another rephrasal of the concept they are proposing: "Don't be the man with a hammer" [not all problems are to be treated as nails - including the health and safety related concerns nails demand].
I do have to wonder who would buy this though. Analog computers like this are virtually useless unless you have some particularly applied use-case for them. I'd be interested to hear some user testimony if anyone owns one of these!
I doubt it, assuming the analog groups are well-designed that's not trivial to just replicate in a DIY breadboard circuit.
No, having all the Op-Amps wired up for me, powered for me, "nulled" for me is a huge improvement over the mess I would have to make on a breadboard to replicate even a part of it.
I only wish it had more than one output (meter) component so I could observe steps along the way.
Did you miss the educational part?
Electronics is physical math. Amplifiers are a perfect example, take an input and multiply it. Resistors can be used to subtract or divide. Combining these functions is how an op-amp works. Combining more components now allows you to do integrals, derivation, and other functions.
From there you take these basic building blocks and apply them to real world problems like audio amplification, processing and filtering. Of course a lot of this is replaced by digital stuff but digital has one huge disadvantage: obsolescence. I can repair a 40 year old analog amplifier. I cant repair a 10 year old stereo with a dead ASIC or DSP/SoC.
You've already highlighted a clear use-case. The Neutron is a semi-modular analogue synth. The whole modular-synth scene is based on this kind of analogue computing, when I look over at my eurorack modules, I have:
* Function generators
* Gates
* AND/ OR / NOR / XOR / NAND / XNOR
* Summing
* Multipliers
* Comparitors (generate a signal based on conditions)
* And more!
That pretty much covers everything in 'The Analog Thing' computer.
Learn to model physical systems with differential equations first (and in 2021 you will probably also learn to solve/integrate them numerically on a computer in the process) then go to op amps.
Here are some other interesting problems you can solve with analog computers that aren't really modeling problems, though: http://dataphys.org/list/dewdneys-analog-gadgets/
What sort of industrial roles/domains is analog computing particularly fit for. And whats the cancer that we see them adopted either replacing or alongside digital computers in those roles.
> As digital computing approaches the limit of Moore's Law, analog computing offers a strategy to diversity today's digital monoculture.
s/diversity/diversify ?
s/today/in today ?
1. Really old, and really expensive
or
2. Somewhat modern, and also pretty expensive
FWIW, here's an Amazon List on this topic that I put together a while back. Looks like there are one or two that can be had for fairly cheap, if used copies are acceptable.
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1ZGZWA01QFE1V?ref_=wl_...
I wound up snagging a couple off of a pirate e-book site but haven't had time to really dig into the whole thing yet.
> An introduction to analog computation containing a brief description of the analog computer and problems in which it can be advantageously applied. Both analog computers and systems combining analog and digital techniques are discussed in order to show why the Agency's interest in this computation area has increased.
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
The analog advantage is that you can directly implement differential equations, so they can be more power-efficient and faster than the equivalent digital simulation.