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A project log for Zuse Switching Element Display

An automated display of Zuses mechanical switching logic

abigaleAbigale 01/16/2019 at 09:320 Comments

Since this project started quite awhile before I created this page, I though it would be best to document the early days and mark the current point.

I have a strong interest in computers and I adore the reading up the various methods use in computers to achieve, well computing! Period designs and the interface also drew me in. But the more I read up on things the more I wanted to do something more (naturally). I decided to replicate part of computer, but which one. I'd list some of the computers I looked at here but I seem to have lost the list. But more or less it was a toss up between artistic vs functional. In the end it was a functional that won. The choice of design came down to the topic at the time, which should be clear of what I was looking into. The Z1 computer.

The next step was to identify which part to replicate, so looking at the documents available online I came across a curious document which was a clear example of "propositional logic" (seen below). (on a side note I'm an English speaker, and German while my preference of choice for langue to learn both now and when I was at school, was not the language I learnt, it was both Chinese and Japanese. So I'm grateful to Google translate for bridging the language gap.)


The though came to me that this document (unmodified) would be a great companion with a working model, if I ever get a chance to present this at a Maker Faire or similar. From there the design process began.

I modeled the main mechanism both in FreeCAD and Solve Space. FreeCAD lost my files, broke constrains and generally gave me headaches while trying to align the pieces, which lead me to switch to Solve Space. It was much better in single part modeling but in the end I got suck on the assembly mode and if I recall correctly something todo with the plane alignment. Once again after considerable time, I went back to FreeCAD and finished it there, though I'm not convinced that it's stable to model against. Guess I'll find that out in the future.

Tired of fiddling with the model I shifted my attention to the electronics side of the project. I decided against using a micro-controller (which meant that It could be done in 5mins (software is what I know best)) of any sort but allowed use of ICs. The result of this lead to using 3 clocks, discreet transistorized gates, an eeprom and a binary counter. This resulted in the board below.

But I'm not too willing to show the bottom side thanks to the monstrosity of an iron that I used for most of the project. Needless to say that the the smallest tip I had was the size of of nearly two traces (on a strip board) which made it hard to keep everything where it belonged. I was using another iron that I bought during the project, but that ended up dying halfway through the project and the fix (replacing the heating element cause it to go pop and release the smoke). I ended up spending more money near the end of this part of the project to get a better iron that so far hasn't died on me; yet.


So that gets you up to scratch with where I am in the project. The next steps that need to be taken are...

It's going to be an interesting journey given half of this I've never done before, but when it's done I'll be quite happy and probably ready to move onto a smaller project, or one that doesn't involve me prodding and poking software to get everything to work as expected.

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