Testing went well. On the hardware side I only had two incidents with crossed wires from the Transaction Table Reader to the Arduino and a single broken LED that needed replacing. Otherwise the build was pretty solid.

Coding also went faster than expected. I'm still tweaking the UI a little but as you can see in the demo that follows IT WORKS (I'm so happy).

Without further adieu here is TMG-1 in action counting to ten. Basically the head adds one to the number already present in the input region (between the b markers) then goes back to the beginning and repeats.

How fast the machine works in RUN mode is one of the things I'm still playing around with.  I want people to see what is going on with each step but not get too frustrated waiting for things to happen. Maybe TMD-1 should RUN faster leaving the learning to STEP mode.  UPDATE: I have made a change so that you can now press the left and right arrow buttons on the Tape Panel when in RUN mode to decrease  or increase the running speed.