{"id":5290,"date":"2004-06-06T08:55:58","date_gmt":"2004-06-06T16:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/06\/5290\/"},"modified":"2004-06-06T08:55:58","modified_gmt":"2004-06-06T16:55:58","slug":"meccano-difference-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/?p=5290","title":{"rendered":"Meccano Difference Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This guy made the Difference Engine with Meccano parts.  The most interesting part to me is how he was forced to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meccano.us\/difference_engines\/rde_1\/digit.html\">adapt the gears<\/a> to store the decimal numbers Babbage&#8217;s designs require:<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Meccano does not provide us with too many examples of tenfold symmetry, so representing decimal numbers is a challenge. Fortunately we can depend on the following two observations. First, by meshing a 95t gear wheel with a 57t gear wheel we get a ratio of 5:3. &nbsp;This means that 1\/10th of a rotation of the larger gear corresponds to 1\/6th of a rotation of the smaller one, and we have available the 6 hole bush wheel. This can provide a detent mechanism to hold the smaller gear in one of 6 positions, corresponding to holding the larger one in one of 10 positions. Second, we note that the ratchet wheel has 20 teeth. &nbsp;Had not this been a multiple of 10, construction of the mechanism may well have been much more difficult.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>  Web link of note: <a HREF='http:\/\/www.meccano.us\/difference_engines\/rde_1\/index.html'>Meccano Difference Engine<\/a><br \/>\n(At http:\/\/www.meccano.us\/difference_engines\/rde_1\/index.html)<\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This guy made the Difference Engine with Meccano parts. The most interesting part to me is how he was forced to adapt the gears to store the decimal numbers Babbage&#8217;s designs require: &#8220;Meccano does not provide us with too many examples of tenfold symmetry, so representing decimal numbers is a challenge. Fortunately we can depend [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}