Kitty Hears Man Machine

...an anagram for "Antikythera Mechanism".

I've been working the abstract world; designing a new hardware description language for yet another turtle.   The Antikythera Mechanism is getting some upgrades from the "Borg Collective" in the form of Turtles and Display Discs.  There's many shared frequencies and phases between the Fractal Computer and the Antikythera Mechanism, so that's been a lot of fun to play with.  I'm sure David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Georg Cantor (1845-1918) would approve.

Photo by Joseph Schell. Courtesy of TechShop.

I based the initial design on the 2002 work of Ettore Pennestri, Pier Paolo Valentini, and Ferdinando Petti.  The major part of this project was designed in about 15 minutes and involved making a few gears and laying them out in an ordered manner.  I'm implementing the function of the device so, I'm not particularly interested in the making an exact copy.

Ms Lovelace quickly identified the crank handle.

I started by focusing on the drive wheel and the primary driven gear section.  I'll add a layer for the differential later.  When you start building these creatures yourself, you'll quickly find the drive mechanism is the place to start and refine. The Antikythera gear train uses a far bit of gearing up, then mixes ratios on a differential, so a smoothing running drive train is a must.

Mr Babbage performing a destructive test on the 96 tooth gear.

So here we have it, version 0.1 of the wooden Antikythera Mechanism.  The 0.2 version grew another foot and the drive mechanism was upgraded to the latest "multiplied by four" frequency system to bring it into the modern fractal computer thinking.

Someone has bitten off some pieces off...  This device will move back to the way Archimedes intended it, gears with tooth count factors of 2's and 3's. 

I made you a computer but I eated it.