Mechanical binary adder by syn2cat hackerspace

First calculation on the binary adder machine. Here we calculate 7+10=17 or 0111+1010=10001
You see 7 half adders, the 3 left towers are each time 2 half adders stacked and on the right side is one additional half adder (which is adding the lowest bits)

So the machine can add 2 numbers of 4 bits each.
On each tower you put the the right value bits of botrh operands. So on colum 2 you put on every input one marble because both operands have a 1 on the second bit position (from the right).

DUring calculation the first adder drops out a marble, that is the lower order bit, value 1.
No other adder drops any marbles.
You can see the carry bits going through the looping to the next adder.
At the end the last adder drops a marble on the floor, that's the carry out. It has a value of 2⁴=16
Result: 1+16=17

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• hackerspace
• syn2cat
• binary
• marble
• run
• mechanical
• adder
• machine
• rube
• goldberg
• science
• festival
• luxembourg
• 2011