Wooden Wireless

N-steps forward by M-step back...

Iambic pentameter or more interestingly, the divergence from. 
To be | or not | to be, || that is | the ques- tion.

Ordered soft and stressed syllables...
da TUM | da TUM | da TUM || TUM da | da TUM

Datum, sounds like symbols to me.  

***Update: Find out what the Egyptian Goddess, Nepit has to do with Shakespeare and pretty much everything. Nepit Goddess of Grain.

Around the Shakespeare's time in the 17th century, Change Ringing spread across the English country from bell tower to bell tower .  The English Art of bell ring was born.  Boozed up youth would play out an ordered mathematical series on tuned bells.  After a predefined number of cycle, the order is changed.  This is the same idea as modern Frequency Shift Keying except better.  It has inbuilt error correction. 

That which changes and that which remains the same.

For the prototype, I hacked together some tuning forks made using my crude machining and wielding skills. I didn't want them to be resonant between themselves otherwise the ringing one would cause the other to ring, making it difficult to detect the changes on the receiving end.  That turned out to not be so difficult.

Machined, welded, bent and welded.  I should stick to woodworking.

At the receiving end we have a microphone, the Fourier transform, and Linux. The idea is that the wooden computer transmits by playing an ordered pair of tones based on an tables stored on a wooden disc.  The order of tones represent the encoded datum.  It works, but the microphone needs to be incredibly close to the tuning forks.  Tuning forks aren't terribly loud.

I'm working on a version using tensioned piano strings to produce a "Wayne's World" time-warp sound.  Of course, the computer must chime when the system boots or changes mode. 

No... strike that! 
Xylophone from the Greek, ξύλον — xylon "wood" and φωνή —phonē, "sound, voice", for wooden sound!
Thanks Wolf!

Laser Power
The quadrature encoders have proven to be more precise, more reliable, lower fiction, faster, and get this, don't require an internal power source.  I think we might even be able to fire some laser beams through it to get a reading at a distance. 

The host computer feeds it's babies until they can leave the nest. 

 Mr. Babbage agrees that quadrature encoders are great for rotational angle feedback.

Mr. Babbage says, "This thing needs more lasers!"