I wanted to make the circuit equivalent of Braess's Paradox but I'm not sure it's possible with these components. Might need to make some mods! The sponsor is Private Internet Access: Get 82% off and 3 extra months free piavpn.com/stevemould
@Luke Arts there are no patents still in force, so without any kind of trademark involved (like lego printed on the links) there's nothing for lego to complain about here.
@Clement Poon Fun question: how big would a spintronics computer be if it has the same architecture as, lets say a system built around an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU. And how much slower will it be? Would be a as big as a concerthal? As big as Germany? Looking forward to your calculations...
That little blue link in the chains makes such a difference in comprehension of the whole model. That was an extremely smart design choice. Little visual design choices like this are what make me happy or drive me nuts with stuff I see every day.
@Hello Kitty Fan Man For my own reference. YT has since stopped given me updates on this debate. I only found it again because somebody liked my previous comments.
@daenerystargaryen (part 3): Please stop being a hypocrite by telling me that *I* should stop bothering people. And yes, people _do_ care, because if you didn't then you wouldn't have replied. Besides, you're not a mind reader, DUH. Also, it's funny that you click "like" on your own replies as a little extra measure of an attempt to make your sad excuse for a point "more convincing," haha!
Steampunk entusiasts could easily take this idea and make a basic, real, steampunk computer. Maybe they'd need to scale it down somehow to make it practical but still. It'd be amazing.
One thing i absolutely love about this is its appearance. It's not some basic colors and simple flat shapes with sans serif text; the colors are metallic and blend well together, the pieces all have etched patterns in them, and the text matches. This is such an elegant, almost Victorian like toy
@Downson Jerome you know teachers dont have to pay for the props and teaching materials out of pocket right? The school would cover that if it was a teaching aid.
@Felipe Lorenzzon teachers get shit pay man and they'd prolly need multiple sets. I don't think many of them would want to drop several hundred on this
The "transistor" piece is voltage controlled, so it's actually more similar to an FET rather than a "basic" BJT transistor, which is current controlled.
@Marshal then u rly need to revise, yes i made a spelling error , but any chip on any smartphone or pc uses CMOS,(which are mosfets) . . Not sure why you are flexing an Meng, are you a student or newly graduated. BJTs are only really used in amplifiers , maybe that qualifies as "advanced components for you" funnily enough , IN the process of making BIcmos,, you get BJTs which are used to drive the high capacitance loads.
I remember an electricity exercise in school where we compared a car shock absorber behavior with an RLC circuit and showed how with the right frequency of currents or bumps on the road, both could enter in resonance. It made me realize how every systems, mechanics, electric or chemicals are interconnected and basically about energy transfer. I still failed that class but had a nice mind blown moment :D
Epic nod to Electroboom. :) Edit : A circuit suggestion: basic h-bridge motor controller. (As seen in under 5v circuits via transistors) Seems ironic to simulate a circuit designed to control rotations via an emulation of electronics done *VIA* rotations.
@thewiseturtle It's an electroboom joke 🤣 He has a unibrow and when he talks about full bridge rectifier, he just puts sound effects like its something heavenly. Go check it out, he talks about electricity.
I'm just so impressed with this kit! Not gonna buy one (probably), but it seem just amazing to me. The ingenuity, the amount of cleaverness and engineering needed to come up and make all these components, the attention to detail. Just wow! Every time you showed another component I was like "No way! That's incredible!".
The great thing is there's a browser based simulation on their website. It has a problem with floating point accuracy when dealing with circuits that spin really slowly, which can cause perpetual motion, but otherwise it's fun to play around with once you understand the concept
I've been into analog electronics & mechanics my whole life, so this is like an amazing combination of the two worlds, I'm genuinely blown away, mostly because it's so simple, yet not something most of us think of creating, though that's probably because it's use is educational + entertaintement and only some of us think about often. It is however much more interesting than I thought at first glance, it's got every component needed to explain any basic (and not so basic!) circuit to someone. Now they should make a Vacuum Tube / FET, so working based on (negative) voltage.
I actually dug up one of my old ECE labs from college and tried to recreate those circuits in the Spintronics simulator. Unfortunately, they all either had components I didn't know how to make, or were just way too complicated. Plus, they had values for resistance and voltage I couldn't seem to create.
prolly bcause they dont show you colorful fancyspinning toys. i was taugh ll thnis. resistors, inductors etc with just a blackboard amd a chalk. and it was so interesting.
if you're talking about school, ever thought maybe its because as a kid you weren't watching science videos but being instructed in a class like a factory worker?
It might be a little complex for spintronics, but maybe it would be interesting to see a very simple op-amp built and demonstrated. With that, I think you could build some basic analog computer components like an integrator or differentiator.
I like how this captures the "everything is a resistor" "everything is a capacitor" "everything is an inductor" aspect of electrronics. Like yeah the 'resistor' has a load of 'resistance', but all the rotating parts do. They also all have some mass and intertia, so they all have some 'inductance', etc
This is just fascinating! What a cool model, clearly very well thought out. The junctions are real deal genius, all according to Kirchhoff's current law, as it should. Lovely ammeter too. And I absolutely love the fact you can build equivalents of not just electrical, but electronic circuits. And yeah, FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!
Fantastic video Steve, as an electrician that understands that side well, I must say the mechanical way of making the same things happen is amazing, it gives my brother 'the mechanic' a way of understanding what goes through my head when i simulate electricity and circuits in my head by translating it since he think of moving parts and gears when he simulates in his head..lol all logic stuff ..Brilliant video, really!!
This is just brilliant! This analogy was very helpful for me to intuitively understand electronics. It also enables me to remember or reconstruct equations.
This idea is really interesting. I remember reading "Snow Crash", and I remember a character in the book learning about mechanical circuits with lengths of chain. Theoretically, you could have something physical that runs assembly, like punch cards, but in another form, where it runs op codes and accesses memory.
This video honestly taught me a lot about electronics, it makes it so simple to understand (of course not 100% accurately but either way). I'm gonna have to go bust out my Arduino kit lol
😂😂😂 "the Veritasium shaped elephant in the room" and later the unibrow (ElectroBoom) joke when talking about the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER. 😂 It was epic! The end segment was remined me of Alan Turing's mechanical computer (which broke the Enigma and helped to win WW2).
@Tamas Lakatos Unfortunately The Imitation Game got a lot wrong. Turing was involved with developing the bombe machines (which weren't computers) to help with speeding up the decryption work on Enigmas. Bombe machines did not crack Enigma - that was always a human step (and was achieved before the bombes were available at Bletchley Park), but they sped up message decryption based on the key intuited by the human. Turing as you say did develop much of the early theory that led to Colossus, which was a computer. But Turing was a mathematician not an engineer, and it was Tommy Flowers (and a small team) that actually designed and built Colossus, and it wasn't used on Enigma, but on Lorenz codes, which were much harder to crack and the bombes couldnt be made fast enough. Colossus only came along in the last year or so of the war, while Enigma had been getting cracked even before the war started.
@Analog Dude there's a fantastic story of German high command sending a 4000 character message twice using the same rotor settings on Lorenz Because of this man sat down for 3 months and worked out exactly how the Lorenz machine worked Unlike enigma we never saw a Lorenz machine until after the war yet due to that small mistake knew how it worked and could crack their codes
This is really cool! The water analogy is a good start to getting an intuition on how circuits work, and this seems like another really great analogy for beginning to understand how electric forces and fields work!
I know almost nothing about how circuits work, but this video gets me excited to learn more, which I love. Finding new ways to understand things or just learning new information that I find interesting is one of my favorite experiences. This video gave me the same feeling, even though I don't know many of the terms you used. Also, spintronics looks so cool, and I'm definitely checking out your water computer video. 10/10
Truly incredible! As an audio electronics designer, I’d love to see a transistor buffer in spintronics, I bet it could work at reasonably low frequency. Thanks again for making these amazing science videos! 😁
This beautiful analogy/metaphor/model looks like something from the game Myst! I like the idea of mapping/finding correspondences between different models of the same phenomenon; it's like translating a poem :) Douglas Hofstadter would likely enjoy it :)
I want to say two things; 1) Great video! I would love to play around with one of those kits. 2) I saw what you did @ ~15:00 with the sight gag about full bridge rectifiers, and I fully appreciated it. I just didn't want you to think your efforts went unnoticed.
All of my electronics designs are limited. I can only use single diodes rather than full-wave bridge rectifiers, because I just don't have the requisite facial hair. :(
Bruh they regulated pressures through a combination of relief valves which are automatic, sometimes steam whistles which are manual and by putting less fuel in the firebox when u want pressure to go down and more when you want it to go up but they did not use these.
I think a full base calculator circuit, even just simulated, would be incredible. A gear based circuit like this would likely be the easiest to make if you have very limited manufacturing resources, as you could even make it work using simple materials like wood or ceramic clay
Repent to Jesus Christ “I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” Psalms 34:4-5 NIV H
I wish I had the money to buy a bunch of these kits, and donate them to the local middle-schools. This feels like the perfect stepping stone for 10-12yo kids who might not be able to grasp the invisible rules that make electronics work, but would absolutely grok a mechanical abstraction (of an abstraction). I absolutely love both the concept and execution. This is such an important teaching tool.
The "water in pipes" visualization was also more solidified for me as a kid due to the Magic School Bus and the Valentine's Day episode where they talk about circuits and the "flow" of electricity. They show the "electrons" flowing and stopping just like particles would in a tube (and in fact the wires are shown as tubes when they find the breaks in circuits)
Really enjoyed this! Would've been a great way of inuititing electrical circuits as a visual thinker. I'm glad to know I can still learn to build simple computers using this form of reasoning.
I wonder if you can make high-pass and low-pass filters with analogous capacitors, just like the electrical models. I think these are more intuitive (it's just because of the way I learned about filters in school) I would also love to see a resonant RLC circuit !
I had an A-Level physics teacher who told me that if you were to have a 100% accurate model of something, then you would just have the thing itself. All diagrams, models, descriptions, analogies, abstractions etc. are going to have some level of imperfection about them because they are not the thing they are trying to explain, but in many cases that's exactly why they are helpful tools in allowing our meaty skull-contents to gain some understanding :)
@Bayonet Only the thing itself is a model of the thing itself, not other things, even very similar ones. Becuase, yes, your body and my body are quite different.
Sometimes the thing itself is not even a 100% accurate model of all such things, due to natural variance. So, say you had a complete model of the human body, which would just be a human body, that could only be a single human body, which is not a complete model for every human body. So how could you ever get a complete model of every human body when each one is slightly different? Here, a model which is actually abstracted from the thing itself (the human body) could be more accurate in representing the totality of human bodies. This is making me think of the Platonic Realm of Forms.
I've long thought of Inductors as "spinning up" like a flywheel, just to keep straight how they work in my head. It's really neat to see them make that analogy into reality.
This is exactly what I thought of in every circuits + electronics lecture I've attended going to uni. Always thought of controlling such mechanical machines via liquids instead of chains, but this seems great.
Got my delivery today (Friday), and so did my neighbour. Sunday is predicted wet, so it's ON! Side note - good point about the blue links. I started assembling chain from the links and I was scratching my head over why they were included. Then I rewatched this video and went "D'oh! To see the speed (spin current) of the individual circuits! Great work, Paul, Alyssa and the team.
This brings back a lot of memories. When I studied systems modeling in the 1990s I got carried away with Bond Graphs which abstract the domain using flow and effort variables, and allow you to implement a system design in electronics, mechanics, fluidics, or other domains that have analog component equations. It was "fun" translating different systems to see what it would look like. If you want to get intuition about this stuff, I highly recommend bond graphs.
This was fun thanks. I bought the kits the other day hoping to have a play and gain some intuition. I then searched for vids on what I can do with them and found yours. I’m particularly interested in the LC circuit analogy for magnetic and dielectric fields that veritaseum alluded to and you mentioned here. I think I know how to set it up using a steinmetz two conductor diagram as the starting point but If you have any tips on how to set a analogous spintronic ‘LC circuit’ like this would be grateful if you could share any tips! Thanks 😊
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply.;
Could one build a frequency discriminator with these? Feel like that would be pretty interesting to see. Feel like it’d be a meaningful mechanical analogy to the effect of different frequencies on LRC-circuits
I've always thought of capacitors as "flexible blockades" in the water pipe analogy (the more you push against it, the more opposing voltage is created), and inductors as flywheels. Something that the kit could have is a all in one voltage converter, which would be basically gear ratio converter to trade between voltage (torque) and current (speed).
It'd be fun to see a mechanical PLL, you can make a vco already and a flip flop to compare phases, so I imagine a PLL wouldn't be too complicated. Another idea that perhaps is too complicated is an opamp, or something with enough gain to show the power of negative feedback.
One of my undergrad papers in electrical engineering was about digital signal filtering through mechanical vibrations of a piezoelectric substrate (to approximate the holy grail of a flat phase response instead of just linear). Basically using mechanics to achieve what was difficult to achieve purely through electronics. It also wasn't just an imagination of mine but an active field, never mind the corollaries between mechanics and electronics often expressed to help students understand electricity and electronics.
It's beautiful and tangible with a great analogy on how electronic components work... The only thing that kept me thinking how can a mechanical action explain wireless energy or wireless connection 🤔. i can't really call it a downgrade technology as long as the logic is there, I can feel the excitement when building these gears. Thumbs up to this
My eleven year old is currently using this kit to build his first circuit “puzzle.” So far, so good. He loves puzzle games and wants to be an engineer of some kind when he grows up, but he’s not sure what kind. We’ll see if electrical engineering or mechanical engineering is his thing. Thanks for this overview. Anything that can get my school-averse kid to actually have fun while learning something new and using his natural curiosity and problem-solving skills with enthusiasm is awesome.
Very nice. I see that Spintronics doesn't have a memristor. It might be interesting to see if that could be created, and what circuits you could build with it.
In our mechanical design course, we had a course comprising Analogies, similitude and modelling. This really helped us in grasping and appreciating the common principles and thread running through the physical world. Excellent presentation gentleman.
I work in a Power Generation station (power plant) so many of these concepts I have learned throughout my 10 years of experience but I wish I would have had stuff like this as a kid (or even youtube for that matter). I could have learned so much more in my adolescents
Paul Boswell, the creator, is an AMAZING guy who also did a mechanical computer, “Turing Tumble”-I could not recommend his work more highly. Thanks for giving him some well-deserved publicity.
Maybe it was inspired by Digi-Comp II, but Turing Tumble takes those ideas to a whole new level, and the book that comes with all of its puzzles are totally original.
👍 Absolutely brilliant! But I think they should reconsider using stamped anodized aluminum pieces (gears) instead of plastic and design a better drive than the chain they have now.
Really cool! As a possible follow-up video, you could describe the analogy. I think we have voltage=torque, current=rotation speed, and so for example charge=current*time=rotation
Great idea this analogy. The brand name is a bit weird though, since spintronics is an entirely different thing, but anyway… I would like to see simple RCL oscillators, and the verification whether the oscillating frequency is what you’d expect as a function of R, C and L (I suspect the wires themselves have quite high values of R, L and C, but it might be taken into account in the given values, so I wonder how accurate it would be…)
Steve, what's your feel for how durable these moving parts in Spintronics will be? I l am very impressed by the concept, but will the plastic moving parts wear out rather soon (and require more expenses to keep the thing going as a teaching tool)?
Hello Steve. Since I first saw Spintronics, I was wondering: Would it be possible to build an astable multivibrator? Would it be very similar to a flip-flop circuit?
Have a look at Charles Babbage's two proposed machines, the difference engine and the analytical engine. Marvelous machines, but I can't exactly complain about the vastly more compact and efficient computers made possible by silicon transistors.
The full bridge rectifier was pretty impressive to see work, not to say the flip flop! I’d love to see some logic circuit being built on that, not just a gate. I’m in sheer disbelief of how great looking this project looks! Great video!
@DeSpace Man yep, for all basic boolean logic gates, he'll need a (usually) one semiconductor per input, and a resistor for pullup or pulldown. Guess Steve needs to buy himself a big pile of mechanical diodes.
@Scott Simon I didn't notice it at first but a little voice in the back of my head starting screaming "something's wrong, Something's Wrong, SOMETHING'S WRONG"
@Randy Ollmann ElectroBoom is a friend of Steve's and he has a meme on his channel where he screams FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER! In a dramatic fashion because A) it sounds cool, and B) its an rather common and useful circuit so it occurs alot in his videos when he talks about electrical engineering.
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST INNOVATIVE AND GENIUS PHYSICAL APPLICATIONS TO ELECTRICAL THEORY AND MECHANICS THAT EXISTS. GENIUS! This is absolutely brilliant. I suffered through Robotics and Embedded Systems degrees with the massive learning curve it takes to learn and understand these concepts and laws. I am a 100% visual learner and this would have helped me tremendously back then. I've already placed my purchase. Every kid is getting this for birthdays and Christmas now!
Seems like the differential is a more complicated and lower fidelity way to do parallel connections vs just stacking the gears on top of each other, but maybe there are some networks that doesn’t allow. Still, this is the intuition I use for electricity so that’s cool to see.
I'm an electrical engineer and at uni we studied mechanical circuits as analogies of electronic circuits, since that was what we were more familiar with. E.g. a mass-spring circuit could be modeled as a LC circuit. A force would translate to a voltage supply, and so on. We also modeled some hydraulic stuff with electrical circuits equivalents, e.g. a water tank could be considered a capacitor.
@George Helyar right! Nature has its loops, laws repeat, upwards and downwards, between certain limits. You can make a computer with electronics, with water pipes and valves, and even with nano-gears. Alas, You might even build supercomputers with proteins alone. Actually, we, you and me, are just that. And by evolution, trial and error alone, imagine engineering that. Next, we're moving into the realm of the unknown... Yet again. Because we must. Because the unknown calls us. Quantum
Well, the analogies are starting to stack up these days... With the energy crisis on the horizon. I take for granted you have already heard about "water batteries", or "gravity batteries", or, their most precise description, "reversible hydroelectric"
@Logan Russell Does it work for negative voltages though? Another way of thinking of a capacitor is a flexible diaphragm that can flex in both directions (negative and positive voltage), think of a trampoline, except it doesn't leak water through (although this could be modeled to be the leakage current). Voltage would be the amount that the diaphragm has extended in either direction, and the capacitance is the cross-section of it. Even crossing the maximum voltage/pressure that the diaphragm can handle would cause a shoot-through, aka it ruptures.
It works because the differential equations are very similar and you can relate the equations from any system to a electrical one. It becomes useful as you can use electrical circuit solving techniques to solve any other physical problem!
I think I learned more about electronics from this video than I have in the last ten years, mostly because I barely ever use it and because none of my teachers talked about inductors for some reason.
Thank you, Steve, for another outside the box presentation of a subject. I signed up for spintronics Kickstarter about two years ago and the first consignment for Britain is due to arrive in Southhampton middle November. I am looking forward to investigating another approach to explaining electronics.
Quite interesting, and thanks for sharing this. I quickly "translated" these components and circuits in my mind as you described them. However, I'm wondering if this would be a good teaching tool for someone who knows nothing about electronics. I can see where it can be used to explain how a circuit might work in an intuitive fashion, but I worry that it will leave that person continually trying to translate circuits back to this analogy tool. I'm not sure if it would be helpful or not.
oh my god what a golden idea. the creativity that went onto building the components as gear mechanisms and getting them to work together is nothing short of amazing.
@alveolate hermeneutist There wouldn't be any IP protection when it comes to the basic components themselves. Spintronics itself is derivative work of concepts that exist in the public domain, you can't patent a sprocket or chain, nor one-way mechanisms such as clutch bearings and ratchets, etc. The only IP protection would be the book that goes along with the set under copyright, and how the set itself is modeled as you can't make a 1:1 reproduction. What use Lego would get out of these kinds of components are not covered by IP protection. Plus there's the blatantly obvious issue that these kinds of gearsets would have an insane amount of frictional losses if they didn't have bearings. Technic will never have bearings for quite obvious reasons. While it might be a decent idea, it just would not work in practice. Plus there's too many issues with how Spintronics approaches certain concepts, which results in bad analogies, something Lego would probably avoid when it comes to educational building systems.
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply. .. ;
i dont know if spintronics has all the necessary components, but it'd be awesome to see it used to make the circuits inside a guitar. who knows, maybe you could make a playable guitar out of it.
It would be pretty neat if you could build a multiplexer with these components. I wonder what the practical size limit of a circuit is though, given that so much energy is lost to the inherent resistance in each connection
This is the best educational video i I have ever seen, You deserve Oscar for this Maaan. I am an ADHDer and i love electricity very much but unfortunately my ADHD is acting as barrier of well understanding theoretical things..and wanted to tell I really need this learning way in everything. even if it is rare to find but i really appreciate your video and the effort beyond it, Thanks its genius
so cool that each electronic component seems to have an abstract, platonic "form" that they embody: dissipator (resistor), container (capacitor), etc abstract forms that are manifested in different devices
I've been imagining something like this for over a decade and always wondered if I could make money by inventing it. Someone beat me to the punch but regardless, this is so sick I couldn't stop smiling throughout the entire video. It's like a dream. Pure glee!
@caiocc12 Also talent is not something innate. It's hard work and determination to keep doing and perfecting and adapting and perseverance until reaching the goal. That's what genius and talent is to me. It's determination and perseverance and hard work. I see determination, perseverance and hard work in these spintronic. That's why i'd say product is genius and people who made it were talented. Very same applies to this YT channel!
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply.''
That's really cool toy! For me personally, water analogy was more mind blowing when I first heard it, maybe because as most people I've had an intuition that you can make electronic from mechanical devices, probably because we all saw mechanical clock at least once in a lifetime, but this cool as well because, like you said, you can literally feel current.
You can definitely make a calculator but it'd be huge. This highlights the practical applications of mechanical computers though. There's a really cool computer chip company that makes digital mechanical chips that are super fast for certain math applications.
whats also really cool is that you have to set up a volt meter in parallel and an ameter in series with this both. this really helped to explain why. I also love analogies its a great way to explain principles and laws to different people in diffferent ways.
At university, learning control theory, we analyzed electrical circuits and mechanical systems using transfer functions and a popular exercise was to make an analogous mechanical configuration to a given circuit and vice versa. This is exactly this. The resistors are friction elements, capacitors springs, inductors masses, voltage a force and current speed. I really loved these similarities, as they give you an additional insight on how everything works.
It's the same thing because they share the same models/equations. Still in some areas (like thermal), they miss some components. Dynamic systems are everywhere in nature but some models (like transfer functions) are impossible
Try and build an operational amplifier with this and see if you can actually calculate gain. I remember for my electronics 2 class the final project was building an op amp on a bread board 😅 it was crazy I believe there was around 23 transistors in that circuit.
Circuit suggestion: Compare a Solid State Tesla Coil circuit to a Spark Gap Tesla Coil circuit. Also: show the difference between 60Hz 120vAC and 50Hz 240vAC (USA -> Euro Mains standards differences) Would be great to see those!! My vote is for the Tesla coil circuits or Resonant circuits (if thats possible in Spintronics), but I think the 120 - 240 US to Euro difference would also be really interesting for people. Especially the frequency differences added in there too. Maybe for experiments sake you could increase the difference of the frequencies (say 50Hz to 200Hz or something) to show a more visible/drastic difference or effect.
As an electrical engineer undergrad student, I might get myself everything just as a good review for everything I learned for Christmas This is addictingly tempting
hey, i think we can think of spintronics component always discharging when detached as them having an "internal resistance" connected in parallel to the main function, so even when outside a circuit the energy inside a spintronics capacitor is dissipated for example
![[슈취타] EP.7 SUGA with 지민](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X6Svs7gYs1U/mqdefault.jpg)
I wanted to make the circuit equivalent of Braess's Paradox but I'm not sure it's possible with these components. Might need to make some mods!
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@Blau q_a
@Luke Arts there are no patents still in force, so without any kind of trademark involved (like lego printed on the links) there's nothing for lego to complain about here.
I shaved off my full bridge rectifier this morning too 😂
@Clement Poon Fun question: how big would a spintronics computer be if it has the same architecture as, lets say a system built around an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU. And how much slower will it be? Would be a as big as a concerthal? As big as Germany? Looking forward to your calculations...
Full bridge rectifier
That little blue link in the chains makes such a difference in comprehension of the whole model. That was an extremely smart design choice. Little visual design choices like this are what make me happy or drive me nuts with stuff I see every day.
@Hello Kitty Fan Man For my own reference. YT has since stopped given me updates on this debate. I only found it again because somebody liked my previous comments.
lol
@daenerystargaryen (part 3): Please stop being a hypocrite by telling me that *I* should stop bothering people. And yes, people _do_ care, because if you didn't then you wouldn't have replied. Besides, you're not a mind reader, DUH. Also, it's funny that you click "like" on your own replies as a little extra measure of an attempt to make your sad excuse for a point "more convincing," haha!
Steampunk entusiasts could easily take this idea and make a basic, real, steampunk computer. Maybe they'd need to scale it down somehow to make it practical but still. It'd be amazing.
@Paulo Samurai A commenter above said they already did that with a simulation version of this.
I believe this has already been done by other means.
Syberia video games
as long as the parts dont wear itself down then it'd be great
No. Steampunk would make it as big as possible
One thing i absolutely love about this is its appearance. It's not some basic colors and simple flat shapes with sans serif text; the colors are metallic and blend well together, the pieces all have etched patterns in them, and the text matches. This is such an elegant, almost Victorian like toy
@Downson Jerome you know teachers dont have to pay for the props and teaching materials out of pocket right? The school would cover that if it was a teaching aid.
@Felipe Lorenzzon teachers get shit pay man and they'd prolly need multiple sets. I don't think many of them would want to drop several hundred on this
@papercut I think it can be target to teachers and schools as a cool demo, so the cost is more affordable to them
thats why it costs $100 for one set haha
The aesthetics of this thing are all brilliant. Really smart industrial design was put into the whole package.
The "transistor" piece is voltage controlled, so it's actually more similar to an FET rather than a "basic" BJT transistor, which is current controlled.
he mixed up a relay for a transistor.
@Jamie Robertson MEng not KZclip degree.
@Marshal then u rly need to revise, yes i made a spelling error , but any chip on any smartphone or pc uses CMOS,(which are mosfets) . . Not sure why you are flexing an Meng, are you a student or newly graduated. BJTs are only really used in amplifiers , maybe that qualifies as "advanced components for you"
funnily enough , IN the process of making BIcmos,, you get BJTs which are used to drive the high capacitance loads.
@Jamie Robertson You literally have no idea what on earth youre talking about.
BJT for a start.
MEng dont try correct me.
I remember an electricity exercise in school where we compared a car shock absorber behavior with an RLC circuit and showed how with the right frequency of currents or bumps on the road, both could enter in resonance. It made me realize how every systems, mechanics, electric or chemicals are interconnected and basically about energy transfer. I still failed that class but had a nice mind blown moment :D
Epic nod to Electroboom. :) Edit : A circuit suggestion: basic h-bridge motor controller. (As seen in under 5v circuits via transistors) Seems ironic to simulate a circuit designed to control rotations via an emulation of electronics done *VIA* rotations.
😂 came to find this, I was so distracted by the brow until he said full bridge rectifier 😭😭
meta spintronics
Had me laughing like a a madman at "full bridge rectifier". Thanks for the video. Great content, as always!
@thewiseturtle ok, your choice 😄
@Adverb Saturday Ah, ok. I don't like Electroboom, though, so I'll pass on your suggestion of watching any more of his stuff.
@thewiseturtle It's an electroboom joke 🤣 He has a unibrow and when he talks about full bridge rectifier, he just puts sound effects like its something heavenly. Go check it out, he talks about electricity.
I thought he was making a wink towards Electro Boom with that😜😜
@Flow State fullll bridge rectifier!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm just so impressed with this kit! Not gonna buy one (probably), but it seem just amazing to me. The ingenuity, the amount of cleaverness and engineering needed to come up and make all these components, the attention to detail. Just wow!
Every time you showed another component I was like "No way! That's incredible!".
The great thing is there's a browser based simulation on their website. It has a problem with floating point accuracy when dealing with circuits that spin really slowly, which can cause perpetual motion, but otherwise it's fun to play around with once you understand the concept
I've been into analog electronics & mechanics my whole life, so this is like an amazing combination of the two worlds, I'm genuinely blown away, mostly because it's so simple, yet not something most of us think of creating, though that's probably because it's use is educational + entertaintement and only some of us think about often.
It is however much more interesting than I thought at first glance, it's got every component needed to explain any basic (and not so basic!) circuit to someone. Now they should make a Vacuum Tube / FET, so working based on (negative) voltage.
I actually dug up one of my old ECE labs from college and tried to recreate those circuits in the Spintronics simulator. Unfortunately, they all either had components I didn't know how to make, or were just way too complicated. Plus, they had values for resistance and voltage I couldn't seem to create.
you know what's life? In school as a kid I would've fallen asleep or just walked out but as an adult I am fascinated by this and not bored at all.
i do have a good grip on those concepts mathematically amd conceptuallybut i never really got the physical feel.
prolly bcause they dont show you colorful fancyspinning toys. i was taugh ll thnis. resistors, inductors etc with just a blackboard amd a chalk. and it was so interesting.
if you're talking about school, ever thought maybe its because as a kid you weren't watching science videos but being instructed in a class like a factory worker?
It might be a little complex for spintronics, but maybe it would be interesting to see a very simple op-amp built and demonstrated. With that, I think you could build some basic analog computer components like an integrator or differentiator.
OpAmps are just integrated transistor amplifiers, so it might kind of work!
I like how this captures the "everything is a resistor" "everything is a capacitor" "everything is an inductor" aspect of electrronics.
Like yeah the 'resistor' has a load of 'resistance', but all the rotating parts do. They also all have some mass and intertia, so they all have some 'inductance', etc
@argentonath My proctologist has a unibrow.
Love your videos!!!
@randal gibbons search for ELECTROBOOM🤣 You can't talk about FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIERS on KZclip without mentioning him
nice to see you here Robert!)
@argentonath This is the funniest reference I've seen lmao
This is just fascinating! What a cool model, clearly very well thought out. The junctions are real deal genius, all according to Kirchhoff's current law, as it should. Lovely ammeter too. And I absolutely love the fact you can build equivalents of not just electrical, but electronic circuits.
And yeah, FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!
Fantastic video Steve, as an electrician that understands that side well, I must say the mechanical way of making the same things happen is amazing, it gives my brother 'the mechanic' a way of understanding what goes through my head when i simulate electricity and circuits in my head by translating it since he think of moving parts and gears when he simulates in his head..lol all logic stuff ..Brilliant video, really!!
I wonder why so few electronic components?
This is just brilliant! This analogy was very helpful for me to intuitively understand electronics. It also enables me to remember or reconstruct equations.
This idea is really interesting. I remember reading "Snow Crash", and I remember a character in the book learning about mechanical circuits with lengths of chain. Theoretically, you could have something physical that runs assembly, like punch cards, but in another form, where it runs op codes and accesses memory.
This video honestly taught me a lot about electronics, it makes it so simple to understand (of course not 100% accurately but either way). I'm gonna have to go bust out my Arduino kit lol
😂😂😂 "the Veritasium shaped elephant in the room" and later the unibrow (ElectroBoom) joke when talking about the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER. 😂 It was epic! The end segment was remined me of Alan Turing's mechanical computer (which broke the Enigma and helped to win WW2).
@Tamas Lakatos Unfortunately The Imitation Game got a lot wrong. Turing was involved with developing the bombe machines (which weren't computers) to help with speeding up the decryption work on Enigmas. Bombe machines did not crack Enigma - that was always a human step (and was achieved before the bombes were available at Bletchley Park), but they sped up message decryption based on the key intuited by the human. Turing as you say did develop much of the early theory that led to Colossus, which was a computer. But Turing was a mathematician not an engineer, and it was Tommy Flowers (and a small team) that actually designed and built Colossus, and it wasn't used on Enigma, but on Lorenz codes, which were much harder to crack and the bombes couldnt be made fast enough. Colossus only came along in the last year or so of the war, while Enigma had been getting cracked even before the war started.
As soon as I saw diode I was waiting for the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER build lol glad Steve didn't disappoint
@Analog Dude there's a fantastic story of German high command sending a 4000 character message twice using the same rotor settings on Lorenz
Because of this man sat down for 3 months and worked out exactly how the Lorenz machine worked
Unlike enigma we never saw a Lorenz machine until after the war yet due to that small mistake knew how it worked and could crack their codes
And his reward for being a war hero? *GETTING FUCKING CASTRATED!*
contributed, but in the end the German made errors, using the same key's for days instead of changing them.
This is really cool! The water analogy is a good start to getting an intuition on how circuits work, and this seems like another really great analogy for beginning to understand how electric forces and fields work!
Well now I wanna see a warehouse floor covered in a functional spintronics computer.
I know almost nothing about how circuits work, but this video gets me excited to learn more, which I love. Finding new ways to understand things or just learning new information that I find interesting is one of my favorite experiences. This video gave me the same feeling, even though I don't know many of the terms you used. Also, spintronics looks so cool, and I'm definitely checking out your water computer video. 10/10
Truly incredible! As an audio electronics designer, I’d love to see a transistor buffer in spintronics, I bet it could work at reasonably low frequency. Thanks again for making these amazing science videos! 😁
This beautiful analogy/metaphor/model looks like something from the game Myst! I like the idea of mapping/finding correspondences between different models of the same phenomenon; it's like translating a poem :) Douglas Hofstadter would likely enjoy it :)
I want to say two things; 1) Great video! I would love to play around with one of those kits.
2) I saw what you did @ ~15:00 with the sight gag about full bridge rectifiers, and I fully appreciated it. I just didn't want you to think your efforts went unnoticed.
All of my electronics designs are limited. I can only use single diodes rather than full-wave bridge rectifiers, because I just don't have the requisite facial hair. :(
in my brain, every time I hear about a FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER I always imagine the unibrow, so my eyes went straight to the right place.
I didn't notice it the first time I watched it. Thanks for pointing it out.
I immediately paused and came to comments!! omg hilarious 🤣🤣
@geak78same story, hat to look twice
This is when you realise how clever the Engineers were during the Steam era. This is what they used to regulate pressures etc.
@Oliver Krohn bro thought steampunk was real ☠☠
Bruh they regulated pressures through a combination of relief valves which are automatic, sometimes steam whistles which are manual and by putting less fuel in the firebox when u want pressure to go down and more when you want it to go up but they did not use these.
did they tho
I think a full base calculator circuit, even just simulated, would be incredible. A gear based circuit like this would likely be the easiest to make if you have very limited manufacturing resources, as you could even make it work using simple materials like wood or ceramic clay
@14:58, I died laughing. You caught me off guard
Well played Steve, well played indeed
Mehdi would be proud
You certainly deserve to be sponsored by Spintronics. After watching this I had to go buy a set for the kids for the holidays.
This is amazing! It makes so many things I've studied much more concrete.
The Electroboom reference when you discussed the full bridge rectifier really got me going. Overall this was a nifty demonstration!
Repent to Jesus Christ “I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.”
Psalms 34:4-5 NIV
H
yeah i lolled
LMAAAAO
Yup, pure brilliance :D
Took me a second as I paused it before he started talking about it.
I wish I had the money to buy a bunch of these kits, and donate them to the local middle-schools. This feels like the perfect stepping stone for 10-12yo kids who might not be able to grasp the invisible rules that make electronics work, but would absolutely grok a mechanical abstraction (of an abstraction). I absolutely love both the concept and execution. This is such an important teaching tool.
The "water in pipes" visualization was also more solidified for me as a kid due to the Magic School Bus and the Valentine's Day episode where they talk about circuits and the "flow" of electricity. They show the "electrons" flowing and stopping just like particles would in a tube (and in fact the wires are shown as tubes when they find the breaks in circuits)
I'd love to see a buck or boost converter. It would have to be manually operated, but would be quite easy to show the concept in an intuitive way.
Really enjoyed this! Would've been a great way of inuititing electrical circuits as a visual thinker. I'm glad to know I can still learn to build simple computers using this form of reasoning.
I wonder if you can make high-pass and low-pass filters with analogous capacitors, just like the electrical models. I think these are more intuitive (it's just because of the way I learned about filters in school)
I would also love to see a resonant RLC circuit !
I had an A-Level physics teacher who told me that if you were to have a 100% accurate model of something, then you would just have the thing itself. All diagrams, models, descriptions, analogies, abstractions etc. are going to have some level of imperfection about them because they are not the thing they are trying to explain, but in many cases that's exactly why they are helpful tools in allowing our meaty skull-contents to gain some understanding :)
@Bayonet Only the thing itself is a model of the thing itself, not other things, even very similar ones. Becuase, yes, your body and my body are quite different.
Sometimes the thing itself is not even a 100% accurate model of all such things, due to natural variance. So, say you had a complete model of the human body, which would just be a human body, that could only be a single human body, which is not a complete model for every human body. So how could you ever get a complete model of every human body when each one is slightly different? Here, a model which is actually abstracted from the thing itself (the human body) could be more accurate in representing the totality of human bodies.
This is making me think of the Platonic Realm of Forms.
I came to that same conclusion a while ago about the universe. The truth is just the universe itself, and we are fragments of it experiencing.
In Statistics, the phrase is: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”
Credit to George Box for that one.
A common saying is "The map is not the territory." Every map is useful for something, and not useful for most everything else.
I've long thought of Inductors as "spinning up" like a flywheel, just to keep straight how they work in my head. It's really neat to see them make that analogy into reality.
This is exactly what I thought of in every circuits + electronics lecture I've attended going to uni.
Always thought of controlling such mechanical machines via liquids instead of chains, but this seems great.
Got my delivery today (Friday), and so did my neighbour. Sunday is predicted wet, so it's ON! Side note - good point about the blue links. I started assembling chain from the links and I was scratching my head over why they were included. Then I rewatched this video and went "D'oh! To see the speed (spin current) of the individual circuits! Great work, Paul, Alyssa and the team.
This brings back a lot of memories. When I studied systems modeling in the 1990s I got carried away with Bond Graphs which abstract the domain using flow and effort variables, and allow you to implement a system design in electronics, mechanics, fluidics, or other domains that have analog component equations.
It was "fun" translating different systems to see what it would look like. If you want to get intuition about this stuff, I highly recommend bond graphs.
This was fun thanks. I bought the kits the other day hoping to have a play and gain some intuition. I then searched for vids on what I can do with them and found yours. I’m particularly interested in the LC circuit analogy for magnetic and dielectric fields that veritaseum alluded to and you mentioned here. I think I know how to set it up using a steinmetz two conductor diagram as the starting point but If you have any tips on how to set a analogous spintronic ‘LC circuit’ like this would be grateful if you could share any tips! Thanks 😊
I've never clicked so fast. A physical description of an invisible process. Loved the breakdown!
@Infinity What can I say, I enjoy a good video!
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply.;
lol I see you in a lot of comment sections
Could one build a frequency discriminator with these? Feel like that would be pretty interesting to see. Feel like it’d be a meaningful mechanical analogy to the effect of different frequencies on LRC-circuits
I've always thought of capacitors as "flexible blockades" in the water pipe analogy (the more you push against it, the more opposing voltage is created), and inductors as flywheels. Something that the kit could have is a all in one voltage converter, which would be basically gear ratio converter to trade between voltage (torque) and current (speed).
It'd be fun to see a mechanical PLL, you can make a vco already and a flip flop to compare phases, so I imagine a PLL wouldn't be too complicated. Another idea that perhaps is too complicated is an opamp, or something with enough gain to show the power of negative feedback.
One of my undergrad papers in electrical engineering was about digital signal filtering through mechanical vibrations of a piezoelectric substrate (to approximate the holy grail of a flat phase response instead of just linear). Basically using mechanics to achieve what was difficult to achieve purely through electronics. It also wasn't just an imagination of mine but an active field, never mind the corollaries between mechanics and electronics often expressed to help students understand electricity and electronics.
It's beautiful and tangible with a great analogy on how electronic components work... The only thing that kept me thinking how can a mechanical action explain wireless energy or wireless connection 🤔. i can't really call it a downgrade technology as long as the logic is there, I can feel the excitement when building these gears. Thumbs up to this
A 555 timer might be simple enough to build in spintronics, and would probably be spectacular to look at.
@satibel , maybe it should be RC time relay instead of 555. Lowers number of transistors to...well...one :)
Just realised I forgot a capacitor.
My vote too!
@Stevel Knievel any kind of operational amplifier would be great. To see it in action would make those winky foxes more understandable
@satibel A 741 op amp would be easier. The resistor count drops to 20! (So still too complex to make cheaply!)
My eleven year old is currently using this kit to build his first circuit “puzzle.” So far, so good. He loves puzzle games and wants to be an engineer of some kind when he grows up, but he’s not sure what kind. We’ll see if electrical engineering or mechanical engineering is his thing. Thanks for this overview. Anything that can get my school-averse kid to actually have fun while learning something new and using his natural curiosity and problem-solving skills with enthusiasm is awesome.
Very nice. I see that Spintronics doesn't have a memristor. It might be interesting to see if that could be created, and what circuits you could build with it.
In our mechanical design course, we had a course comprising Analogies, similitude and modelling. This really helped us in grasping and appreciating the common principles and thread running through the physical world. Excellent presentation gentleman.
I work in a Power Generation station (power plant) so many of these concepts I have learned throughout my 10 years of experience but I wish I would have had stuff like this as a kid (or even youtube for that matter). I could have learned so much more in my adolescents
A strain gauge would be an interesting demonstration.
Do they have variable resistors? Like tighten a bolt to increase friction/resistance type parts.
Paul Boswell, the creator, is an AMAZING guy who also did a mechanical computer, “Turing Tumble”-I could not recommend his work more highly. Thanks for giving him some well-deserved publicity.
Maybe it was inspired by Digi-Comp II, but Turing Tumble takes those ideas to a whole new level, and the book that comes with all of its puzzles are totally original.
Considering he made that simulator free and open source, he deserves it.
👍 Absolutely brilliant! But I think they should reconsider using stamped anodized aluminum pieces (gears) instead of plastic and design a better drive than the chain they have now.
You can imagine how brilliant this Spintronics thing is, when a third-party youtuber is making a (nonsponsored)video on it!
111,1+1th
Really cool! As a possible follow-up video, you could describe the analogy. I think we have voltage=torque, current=rotation speed, and so for example charge=current*time=rotation
Great idea this analogy. The brand name is a bit weird though, since spintronics is an entirely different thing, but anyway… I would like to see simple RCL oscillators, and the verification whether the oscillating frequency is what you’d expect as a function of R, C and L (I suspect the wires themselves have quite high values of R, L and C, but it might be taken into account in the given values, so I wonder how accurate it would be…)
Steve, what's your feel for how durable these moving parts in Spintronics will be? I l am very impressed by the concept, but will the plastic moving parts wear out rather soon (and require more expenses to keep the thing going as a teaching tool)?
I'd love to see a binary adder made with the transistors!
Completely crazy! I love these kinds of analogies.
I really appreciate you for making this analogy between electrical and mechanical systems. It really helps me better understand Control systems.
Well, he presented it but it looks like you can get your own set of models to try out too!
Same. Really cool video ❤
so many pieces fell in place watching this video, thank you! this was brilliant!!
Hello Steve. Since I first saw Spintronics, I was wondering: Would it be possible to build an astable multivibrator? Would it be very similar to a flip-flop circuit?
Does Steve Mold came up with this idea visualizing Electronics? This is pure genius! Also Steve you know a lot to explain this in front of camera too.
You should make a fuzz face guitar pedal circuit using spintronics! Other than a clean boost it's probably the simplest circuit to try to model.
Now that you mentioned about logic gates, I wonder what the mechanical equivalent of a computer might look like (if possible)
Have a look at Charles Babbage's two proposed machines, the difference engine and the analytical engine. Marvelous machines, but I can't exactly complain about the vastly more compact and efficient computers made possible by silicon transistors.
The full bridge rectifier was pretty impressive to see work, not to say the flip flop! I’d love to see some logic circuit being built on that, not just a gate. I’m in sheer disbelief of how great looking this project looks! Great video!
@leptok It was the FULL BROW RIDGE-IFIER!
@DeSpace Man yep, for all basic boolean logic gates, he'll need a (usually) one semiconductor per input, and a resistor for pullup or pulldown. Guess Steve needs to buy himself a big pile of mechanical diodes.
@Kenny Martin Thanks
@Scott Simon I didn't notice it at first but a little voice in the back of my head starting screaming "something's wrong, Something's Wrong, SOMETHING'S WRONG"
@Randy Ollmann ElectroBoom is a friend of Steve's and he has a meme on his channel where he screams FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER! In a dramatic fashion because A) it sounds cool, and B) its an rather common and useful circuit so it occurs alot in his videos when he talks about electrical engineering.
Id love to see a binary adder out of these. I dont understand a whole lot of electronical stuff but i find it so interesting
Really interesting and fun exercise! Thanks for the intro to spintronics!
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST INNOVATIVE AND GENIUS PHYSICAL APPLICATIONS TO ELECTRICAL THEORY AND MECHANICS THAT EXISTS. GENIUS! This is absolutely brilliant. I suffered through Robotics and Embedded Systems degrees with the massive learning curve it takes to learn and understand these concepts and laws. I am a 100% visual learner and this would have helped me tremendously back then. I've already placed my purchase. Every kid is getting this for birthdays and Christmas now!
Seems like the differential is a more complicated and lower fidelity way to do parallel connections vs just stacking the gears on top of each other, but maybe there are some networks that doesn’t allow. Still, this is the intuition I use for electricity so that’s cool to see.
This stuff is just brilliant. I can just see a 2 bit adder having quite a bit of resistance and needing quite a battery.
I'm an electrical engineer and at uni we studied mechanical circuits as analogies of electronic circuits, since that was what we were more familiar with. E.g. a mass-spring circuit could be modeled as a LC circuit. A force would translate to a voltage supply, and so on.
We also modeled some hydraulic stuff with electrical circuits equivalents, e.g. a water tank could be considered a capacitor.
@George Helyar right! Nature has its loops, laws repeat, upwards and downwards, between certain limits. You can make a computer with electronics, with water pipes and valves, and even with nano-gears. Alas, You might even build supercomputers with proteins alone. Actually, we, you and me, are just that. And by evolution, trial and error alone, imagine engineering that. Next, we're moving into the realm of the unknown... Yet again. Because we must. Because the unknown calls us. Quantum
Well, the analogies are starting to stack up these days... With the energy crisis on the horizon. I take for granted you have already heard about "water batteries", or "gravity batteries", or, their most precise description, "reversible hydroelectric"
@Logan Russell Does it work for negative voltages though? Another way of thinking of a capacitor is a flexible diaphragm that can flex in both directions (negative and positive voltage), think of a trampoline, except it doesn't leak water through (although this could be modeled to be the leakage current). Voltage would be the amount that the diaphragm has extended in either direction, and the capacitance is the cross-section of it. Even crossing the maximum voltage/pressure that the diaphragm can handle would cause a shoot-through, aka it ruptures.
It works because the differential equations are very similar and you can relate the equations from any system to a electrical one. It becomes useful as you can use electrical circuit solving techniques to solve any other physical problem!
absolutely amazing, & very clever, just goes to show how clever the human mind is at working out problems. Thank you.
I think I learned more about electronics from this video than I have in the last ten years, mostly because I barely ever use it and because none of my teachers talked about inductors for some reason.
Thank you, Steve, for another outside the box presentation of a subject. I signed up for spintronics Kickstarter about two years ago and the first consignment for Britain is due to arrive in Southhampton middle November. I am looking forward to investigating another approach to explaining electronics.
Thanks for the cool video… You touched on this briefly, but would it be possible to model a two-way loudspeaker with a tweeter/woofer crossover?
Quite interesting, and thanks for sharing this. I quickly "translated" these components and circuits in my mind as you described them. However, I'm wondering if this would be a good teaching tool for someone who knows nothing about electronics. I can see where it can be used to explain how a circuit might work in an intuitive fashion, but I worry that it will leave that person continually trying to translate circuits back to this analogy tool. I'm not sure if it would be helpful or not.
oh my god what a golden idea. the creativity that went onto building the components as gear mechanisms and getting them to work together is nothing short of amazing.
@alveolate hermeneutist There wouldn't be any IP protection when it comes to the basic components themselves. Spintronics itself is derivative work of concepts that exist in the public domain, you can't patent a sprocket or chain, nor one-way mechanisms such as clutch bearings and ratchets, etc. The only IP protection would be the book that goes along with the set under copyright, and how the set itself is modeled as you can't make a 1:1 reproduction. What use Lego would get out of these kinds of components are not covered by IP protection.
Plus there's the blatantly obvious issue that these kinds of gearsets would have an insane amount of frictional losses if they didn't have bearings. Technic will never have bearings for quite obvious reasons. While it might be a decent idea, it just would not work in practice. Plus there's too many issues with how Spintronics approaches certain concepts, which results in bad analogies, something Lego would probably avoid when it comes to educational building systems.
lego technic needs to buy this company or at least access to their IP
So naive. Electronic circuits were derived from mechanical devices. Do some reading.
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply. .. ;
It would be very interesting to see a simulation of a thyristor with spintronics, it seems really interesting
i dont know if spintronics has all the necessary components, but it'd be awesome to see it used to make the circuits inside a guitar. who knows, maybe you could make a playable guitar out of it.
It would be pretty neat if you could build a multiplexer with these components. I wonder what the practical size limit of a circuit is though, given that so much energy is lost to the inherent resistance in each connection
This is the best educational video i I have ever seen, You deserve Oscar for this Maaan. I am an ADHDer and i love electricity very much but unfortunately my ADHD is acting as barrier of well understanding theoretical things..and wanted to tell I really need this learning way in everything. even if it is rare to find but i really appreciate your video and the effort beyond it, Thanks its genius
so cool that each electronic component seems to have an abstract, platonic "form" that they embody: dissipator (resistor), container (capacitor), etc
abstract forms that are manifested in different devices
I've been imagining something like this for over a decade and always wondered if I could make money by inventing it. Someone beat me to the punch but regardless, this is so sick I couldn't stop smiling throughout the entire video. It's like a dream. Pure glee!
@caiocc12 Also talent is not something innate. It's hard work and determination to keep doing and perfecting and adapting and perseverance until reaching the goal.
That's what genius and talent is to me.
It's determination and perseverance and hard work.
I see determination, perseverance and hard work in these spintronic. That's why i'd say product is genius and people who made it were talented.
Very same applies to this YT channel!
Another cool analogy is: You can take everything that was done here and replace the chains with oil lines, and have all the same logic applied hydraulically, or even pneumatically with pressure instead of voltage. The interesting dynamic of how it applies force to a motor for example: electrically you can spin a motor magnetically, where as hydraulic/ pneumatical systems can spin a motor kinetically. Electricity has volts/ current/ resistance, where as fluids have pressure/ flow/ volume, volume has length/ width/ height, a Kinetic system has mass/ velocity/ inertia, a magnetic systems has attraction/ repel/ conduction, a thermal system has temperature/ pressure/ conduction, a mechanical system has torque/ velocity/ friction, friction has pressure/ temperature/ velocity, states of matter have solid/ liquid/ gas, time has past/ present/ future, space has length/ width/ height, velocity has distance/ time/ vector (direction)... on and on; It's easy to see how many of these qualities overlap and how many systems shake hands with each other-- and that's without even stepping into chemical and nuclear interactions. The shear complexity of what is possible within the laws of physics with only a finite amount of elements, is literally brain melting when you try to think about it deeply.''
The genius is not always in the idea, sometimes the genius is in how to turn the idea into a viable product
Thank you and your amazing brain for helping us understand complicated things in a simple manner.
That's really cool toy! For me personally, water analogy was more mind blowing when I first heard it, maybe because as most people I've had an intuition that you can make electronic from mechanical devices, probably because we all saw mechanical clock at least once in a lifetime, but this cool as well because, like you said, you can literally feel current.
It would be interesting to see a 7-segment decoder with this. But for that you would first have to recreate a led.
You can definitely make a calculator but it'd be huge. This highlights the practical applications of mechanical computers though. There's a really cool computer chip company that makes digital mechanical chips that are super fast for certain math applications.
whats also really cool is that you have to set up a volt meter in parallel and an ameter in series with this both. this really helped to explain why. I also love analogies its a great way to explain principles and laws to different people in diffferent ways.
At university, learning control theory, we analyzed electrical circuits and mechanical systems using transfer functions and a popular exercise was to make an analogous mechanical configuration to a given circuit and vice versa. This is exactly this. The resistors are friction elements, capacitors springs, inductors masses, voltage a force and current speed. I really loved these similarities, as they give you an additional insight on how everything works.
Sound like Ogata's "system dynamic " book 😂
Force voltage analogy , force current analogy
Sounds like you had a good control theory prof, must have been nice! Mine really wasn't so great 😕
It's the same thing because they share the same models/equations. Still in some areas (like thermal), they miss some components. Dynamic systems are everywhere in nature but some models (like transfer functions) are impossible
I did have the same subject, good times back then
Try and build an operational amplifier with this and see if you can actually calculate gain. I remember for my electronics 2 class the final project was building an op amp on a bread board 😅 it was crazy I believe there was around 23 transistors in that circuit.
It would be interesting to see an FM synthesizer in spintronics.
Circuit suggestion:
Compare a Solid State Tesla Coil circuit to a Spark Gap Tesla Coil circuit.
Also: show the difference between 60Hz 120vAC and 50Hz 240vAC (USA -> Euro Mains standards differences)
Would be great to see those!! My vote is for the Tesla coil circuits or Resonant circuits (if thats possible in Spintronics), but I think the 120 - 240 US to Euro difference would also be really interesting for people. Especially the frequency differences added in there too. Maybe for experiments sake you could increase the difference of the frequencies (say 50Hz to 200Hz or something) to show a more visible/drastic difference or effect.
As an electrical engineer undergrad student, I might get myself everything just as a good review for everything I learned for Christmas
This is addictingly tempting
Muito bem parabéns, continua para o futuro
Loved the uni-brow during the full bridge rectifier 😂😂
hey, i think we can think of spintronics component always discharging when detached as them having an "internal resistance" connected in parallel to the main function, so even when outside a circuit the energy inside a spintronics capacitor is dissipated for example
Wow, this is beautiful! Thank you for sharing this excellent analogy!