A few people have designed boolean logic devices using LEGO pneumatics… I had suspected that there would be a large number of logic devices using mechanic principals, but a search for mechanical logic devices didn’t get many hits.

He decided to take matters into his own hands and design mechanical LEGO logic gates. A clockwise rotation represents a binary “one” while a counter-clockwise rotation represents a binary “zero.” The AND gate seems to require less pieces than a NAND gate, contrary to transistor design.

Unfortunately, he failed to implement an XOR gate. I wonder if it would require a more complex mechanical design (contrary to its simple transistor layout.) Kudos to the first person who implements a 16-bit binary adder with a Manchester carry chain using LEGO! VLSI is not my strong point.

Standford University’s robot car, Stanley, was the first autonomous vehicle to win the elusive DARPA Grand Challenge. Popular Mechanics describes how they conquered the challenge.

Stanley’s optical cortex was the Mapper program, which interpreted the 3D LIDAR map and compressed it into a manageable 2D map divided into a grid of 30 x 30-centimeter cells. The cells were designated as free (driveable), occupied (obstacle) or unknown.

The article describes their many challenges, the “eyes” of the vehicle, its mechanics, mapping software, and navigation system. The article is an interesting look into the complex design of a Stanford’s Stanley or any DARPA challenger.