But what is the blue number in the small black box in the upper right hand corner for? Hi All. Wanderer here. What book did you read to learn to tie your shoes, or drive a standard transmission? So is the next solar eclipse of 21 August 2017, for which the reverse is true. it was quite a scare finding out the site is dead after all this time collecting pieces and finally finishing a device. Hi dan, I have built the Antikythera machine and now want to calibrate it for Australian east coast (or globally). It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games. The Antikythera Mechanism is the world’s first known mechanical computer, used by ancient Greeks to predict the path of planets in the sky, the dates of eclipses, lunar phases, and several religious calendars. Please send a message to dan edgerton org and I'll send you the files. That covers "[...] pipelined computers, virtual memories, implementation of a simple time-sharing operating system, interrupts and real-time, and techniques for parallel processing". It is not quite the mystery that the pyramids are, but it definitely will leave the average person scratching their head. Look like part 30552: Hinge Cylinder 1 x 2 Locking with 1 Finger and Axle Hole on Ends. Dude you are the best!! Our mechanism has been enjoyed by thousands of visitors to our museum over the last three years. Antikythera Mechanism Build. Once the storm passed, they decided to scout the area for sponges be… I am good to go then. Ohh exciting. This website brings to together all relevant information, like publications and videos, about the ancient Antikythera mechanism. The reformulated Saros dial uses Universal Time (UT) and is good for anywhere if you know the conversion from UT. I am so very pleased that someone was able to do the reverse engineering for this device. Antikythera Mechanism and its known fragments are currently placed in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. I am OK with the UT concept and how to apply it. I haven't actually looked at my build for ages now. I started reverse engineering this project a year ago and have been so busy at work I have not made as much progress as hoped on the actual build. I, too, wish LEGO would make the kit! Since they were all virtually handmade, the cars were outrageously expensive. On my recent vacations to Athens I visited National Archeological Museum where the Antikythera is displayed. Specifically, I was thinking that the Saros dial may only show events visible from US west coast and that I'd therefore need one with additional or alternative events that are visible from Australia east coast. Wow! After that it gets complicated. The instructions are (visually) correct though. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Antikythera%20comments%3E0&sor... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk. :-). I had a friend in honours year computer science who did a project on tomography of the antikythera mechanism (working on image analysis software to remove ghost images of other layers), and helped discover why his advisor's previous model of the mechanism was mechanically immobile (when you turned it, it locked). Antikythera mechanism, ancient Greek mechanical device made of bronze and used to calculate and display information about astronomical phenomena. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, … :-). I've also added some text to help explain what each component is doing. This guy on youtube is crowdsourcing a series where he is recreating the mechanism, I like the fact that these devices were well attested in history (. A good approach to get more knowledgeable is going bottom-up from transistors and top-down from FPGA (and suffer Verilog/VHDL), attempting to experiment and design your own instruction set while trying to understand the physics and logic, progressively bridging the gap in between in both directions. The Antikythera Mechanism Front view of the Antikythera Mechanism. Take these two courses from EdX, which are 60 hours each: "Computation Structures - Part 1: Digital Circuits" [1], "Computation Structures 2: Computer Architecture" [2]. Below is a recreation of the Antikythera mechanism. It’s a wonder the Antikythera mechanism was discovered at all. MANY, MANY thanks, Dan for kindly supplying your time and effort in redesigning the Saros dial! The Antikythera mechanism is according to researchers another product of Greece. Today, we find a 2000-year-old computer on the ocean floor. I'm loving this build! I had a friend in honours year computer science who did a project on tomography of the antikythera mechanism (working on image analysis software to remove ghost images of other layers), and helped discover why his advisor's previous model of the mechanism was mechanically immobile (when you turned it, it locked). The Antikythera Mechanism tracked planetary positions, predicted lunar and solar eclipses, and even signaled the next Olympic Games. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to digital computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions. I doubt Intel writes down everything they've figured out. Especially seeing the recontructioned devices gave me completely new perspective about ancient Greece. So if you are wanting to see those bronze fragments in real-time, you have to make a trip to Athens, Greece. 234 likes. He'd discovered that an axis seen end-on was actually 2 axes, if I remember correctly. Yep. Turns out there is not a part that connects the bar to the hinge cylinder - the original stock photo of the 1 x 12 bar I had did not show the extension of the bar past the one stud - so all is good. One people seem to keep chasing is Damascus steel. There is no other instrument like it, nothing found until today compares to the Antikythera mechanism and better yet, there are no recorded texts that would suggest that something like it ever existed. Antikythera mechanism has been listed as a level-5 vital article in an unknown topic. I like to research fine weapons. For anyone interested, the Clickspring YouTube channel is recreating the Antikythera Mechanism. The first teaches "[...] digital encoding of information, principles of digital signaling; combinational and sequential logic, implementation in CMOS, useful canonical forms, synthesis; latency, throughput and pipelining". The gear to use for the calendar dial needle is 6542a (not 6542b). Got 120 hours and want to become one of them? I postponed doing this work for almost 3 years. Similarly, it's said there are not enough people alive that know how to handfit a revolver. Fantastic. Hello Edgerton, my school is planning to make a Lego Antikythera mechanism. I would very much like to look at your new Saros dial. In the past, with only analog technology, time and place required mechanical gearing. Why wouldn't they be? I worked pretty much from the gear counts alone. Originally, it contained at least 30 gears, dials, scales, axles, and pointers. The complexity of the Antikythera Mechanism suggests that the device was crafted as part of an engineering tradition developed over decades or centuries. Our mechanism has been enjoyed by thousands of visitors to our museum over the last three years. The Antikythera mechanism is an mechanical calculator.It is also described as the first mechanical computer.It was discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, Greece.A number of gears worked together, much like they do in a mechanical clock.Using a model, it was found that the device could be use to show the motions of the sun, the moon and probably some of the planets. First, for instance, I look at the first part listed which is 8X 3737. I have uploaded the dial pdf's to my GitHub: . No worries, mate. http://acarol.woz.org/antikythera_mechanism.html, http://bricksafe.com/pages/WillPilgrim/Antikythera, https://github.com/MaartenKool/Projects-Antikythera, https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://acarol.woz.org/AntikytheraTopLarge.jpg, https://makermotor.com/pn00309-150-12v-brushless-dc-bldc-115v-230v-ac-gearmotor-reversible-variable-speed-drive-150rpm-maximum-nema-23-frame/, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155892493004972&set=a.145069854971.142473.558399971&type=3&theater, http://www.exploresequoiakingscanyon.com/dark-sky-festival.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk, Rebrickable thinks you are from US with the IP address 198.71.239.15. Thank you Andrew and Sean (WillPilgrim) for all that you have done. Unfortunately the recycling of valuable metal, both in ancient and medieval times, has resulted in nearly all mechanisms being destroyed. Apparently the process Colt used on their pistols to color and shine them is completely undocumented and now unknown. And although it took them many years to rescue the Antikythera Mechanism from the realm of UFOs, they succeeded in the end. I chose the diameter of my gears to be, in millimetres, half the number of teeth so the radius you asked about was a quarter. I tried to access your site from the information you supplied, trying many arrangements, but to no avail. Well, I finally got mine built and calibrated and verified. I'm not sure what that is yet... Like TobyMac said, the blue number is there to indicate the exact length of the axle in LDU's (. You have spent a lot of time creating the manual and I wanted to say THANKS!! I'm really surprised at how trouble-free the mechanism has been under more-or-less daily use; early on I had to add bushings to keep two gears from slipping. Thanks^^ I am very interested in your work. Recently started back up on this effort and found your MOC. It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy. Hope you managed to get the build done in the end. It is sophisticated, complex, and ingenious to the point for years science could not explain its purpose, and only in 2005-2006 it was possible to finally understand at least part of its complex nature. It is as if knowledge about them was methodically wiped off history, or more likely (since history is written by non-engineers) it was not understood well enough to write about it. A dial on the front combines zodiacal and solar calendars, while dials on the back capture celestial cycles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_... https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-dig... https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer... https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-3-computer... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d. If you can improve it, please do. I highly recomend seeing this device and its recreations live there. If it's an interesting Wikipedia submission, those are on topic. There's good evidence that this kind of thing was made in the Arab world in the "dark ages" and that many of the moving statues in western europe were powered from the same sort of mechanisms in the medeival period. Firstly someone has to create a mechanical calculating technology that is lost to history before being discovered in a shipwreck by a society that has globally networked its modern equivalent. Thanks for posting this WillPilgrim. It is only preserved if there has been is a continuous line of people preserving it. Or if it is, it's almost an afterthought, not the primary method of knowledge transfer. So I've made extensive modifications to the instructions with lots of arrows to help show what goes where. The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a … Amazingly enough he forgot to mention this in the end of year presentation of his work, so I got to ask that question to remind him... talk about burying the lede. Transistors give you logic gates and opamps, from which you can build computation and memory, add a clock to apply input from a certain address (the PC) to a set of logic gates (the instruction set) that can read and store and you have a very crude (and very inefficient) programmable CPU in no time (compared to something even remotely like a 8080 or even a 6502). Thanks Again! The Antikythera mechanism is one of the world's oldest known geared devices. How did a strange lump of bronze and decayed wood discovered in a shipwreck reveal the first ever computer? I live in South Korea^^ Could you share your work for me? The device seemed to have a range of interlocking gears made of bronze and a hand crank to give a turning movement to the geared mechanism, plus a display that showed information about the moon, sun and planets against a … Do you have anything that can help? It’s not the logic but the technology that is not widely known: the new fabs cost billions. I do plan to look at more parts such as axles, etc that you recommend, however - thank you for your reply! You are welcome. Sorry you need to upgrade to the Pro Plan before you can use this feature. Andrew Carol's Antikythera Device Lego model. I am still missing some of the videos but this should give an idea of how it was made. It has puzzled and intrigued historians of science and technology since its discovery. They became caught in a storm and were forced take shelter around the island’s main port of Potamós. ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM by John H. Lienhard. I'm on the west coast north of Andrew Carol's location so his Saros Dial should work for me, but aside from surfing recent eclipses and trying to guess and match the patter on the Saros dial... even an exact date for a couple of the eclipses (saros spiral level 1-4 and position) would help along with where the hour adjust should be. Sean, I can't thank you enough for all the work you've put into this. Not sure how they got out of synch with the parts list. Not only is he recreating the mechanism, he's also exploring antique methods and materials that were possibly used. The Antikythera Mechanism. I know a little about semiconductors from school but I certainly wouldn't know where to start, even for a tiny 8-bit one. You are correct. There are three main ways that people have attempted to make an Antikythera Mechanism. Thanks so much for getting back to me. Further, attention is given to its working with special focus on the gearing trains to make predictions. Could you please share the Saros dial with us? A most remarkable and awesome achievement! Here is what I had to do to calibrate it. The Antikythera Mechanism can not possibly be real or have ever worked because the original fragment does not have enough gear wheels to make it run. The parts of the mechanism that have survived are seven large fragments and 75 small pieces, although it’s not entirely clear whether all of these small pieces belong to the mechanism. And how does posting a Wikipedia article link make it to near the top of Hacker news? I think everything else you need (welding equipment, drills, etc) would be fairly straightforward to cobble together. Click here for audio of Episode 1031. Among other finds was the Antikythera mechanism, which is the ancient mechanism of the highest level of sophistication among the mechanisms that have been found until now and is considered as the highest technology mechanism in antiquity. Got it, thanks a lot! Please send me a message to dan at edgerton dot org and I'd be happy to send the files your way. The museum displays them from time to time with various artifacts from the Antikythera wreck. What's hard is making them as complex, fast, and small as we do nowadays. The kids may not understand the saros, but they love watching the gears turn. I have 3D printed a working model of the Antikythera Mechanism. In the homework and labs for that one, you optimize your CPU from the second part for size and speed, and make it support time sharing operating systems. If you want to make civilization resistant to collapse and increase its ability to recover quickly: bury gear cutters, lathes, magnifying glasses, precision tools, etc. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA. Dude, you are amazing even for reverse engineering this with so little to work on! In fact, eliminating the (US west coast) geographical bias inherent in the original Saros dial was my entire reason for reformulating it. Greatly appreciated. Memory for registers and program is given as a black box--by this point you know enough to design that, but it would just add a lot of components and complexity, and slow down the simulation, and the time spent dealing with it would distract from learning the topic of this part of the course. The Building Instructions for this MOC can be found on an external site: Create an account and enter your LEGO collection If the available Saros dial from the linked site has global events, only some of which are visible from my location, then I should be OK. That would fit better with the first part of the course. Also, supposedly, the styrofoam used inside thermonuclear weapons. People died, and there weren't enough new people entering the field to learn it all before the critical mass of knowledge died with them. If you’re talking about losing the ability to recreate any particular relevant CPU, then. The original Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera (hence its name) in … Personally though,  I would just redesign the hand with easier to find technic parts and use axles instead of the bar and antenna. But if you can get by with something not as complex or fast, and that takes up most of your desk, thousands of people know how to do it. I suggest contacting Edgerton (from these comments). The most difficult part will be bootstrapping the ability to build accurate tools with which to rebuild an industrial society. Got it ! Astronomer here. Hope you got it alright. It was discovered in the Antikythera … Great for Batman, not so good for us mere mortals. Hello Edgerton, . I can imagine prediction of the seasons being useful for agriculture and trade, but people may have figured out how to do that without a calculating machine. I'm looking at the parts list at the bottom of the page and being new here I have some questions. It was made sometime around 100BC, and it was not until a thousand years later that anything rivaling its complexity was found. Because the design and engineering greatly outstripped the extant methods of manufacturing the devices didn’t actually work that well. Even in more recent history, too. Just sent you an e-mail request. The Antikythera Mechanism’s Mechanics. So fascinating that I simply cannot avoid building it sometime in the next year or so. I think you have definitely broken the record for the most gears in one MOC. https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/early-1900s-cars.html, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1821540. In the year 1901, artifacts are retrieved from sea. The kids may not understand the saros, but they love watching the gears turn. The Antikythera Mechanism, he argued, was one of their gifts [source: Seabrook]. Thanks to Andrew mainly for the brilliant design in the first place! No need to posit a conspiracy here. He has UT Saros dials which are probably much better. We first give an account of the discovery of the Antikythera treasure, which was found by Symian sponge divers in November 1900. Astrological uses would have depended on the particular astrology being in use. Information from antiquity is lost by default. The second covers "[...] instruction set architectures and assembly language, stacks and procedures, 32-bit computer architecture, the memory hierarchy, and caches". After a significant break I have decided to update the instructions with much improved clarity. The early 1900s cars were, to many, a despicable symbol of arrogance and power. I built this model using your instructions, with a fellow member of the Gold Coast Techspace. I just updated the parts list. You are very welcome. By 1900, at least 100 different brands of horseless carriages were being marketed in the United States. What is remarkable is how much is crammed into such a small space. Make: contributor Chris from Clickspring has an amazing series of videos on YouTube called “Reconstructing the Antikythera Mechanism.” In the series, the ancient and wondrous Antikythera Mechanism is introduced, explained, and then Chris goes about the very challenging task of trying to figure out how each component was made and then making it himself. The Antikythera mechanism is defined as an ancient Greek analogue computer which is mainly is to determine the astronomical positions, purpose of astrological, eclipse for calendar. I've got the entire right side of the machine calibrated, and it is extremely accurate, and is easy to do, but the left side, I'm at a loss. It's actually possible to build a working machine lathe out of the parts of an ordinary car engine. I believe that the bulk of knowledge, in most fields, is passed from person to person through active practice, not through books. In the homework and labs you design and implement (in a simulator) a 32-bit ALU. And thanks for your work on providing a globally usable Saros dial. This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Antikythera mechanism article. It seems like only a handful of people ever made them and it probably didn’t even last for very long after Archimedes died. Now, if an eclipse -- solar or umbral lunar -- is visible from somewhere, anywhere on Earth, it's on the dial. Glad you enjoyed it. I'm not sure how true the latter is, but really makes you wish Wiki or the internet existed further back. It's been lubricated here and there on two occasions, and that's really about all we've done to it. There are bits missing, there are no pointers, and no obvious function to the casual observer. Great listen here : It could be that the thing just had no use, or that it became obsolete. Expertise in both pin-and-slot techniques and epicyclic gearing simulating variable planetary motions was … I not find your Email adress. There's also a third course in the series: "Computation Structures 3: Computer Organization" [3]. Books, as a cheap way to widely distribute knowledge, are relatively recent innovation, and most of what I know about any topic is not written in books. I had a lot of feedback that it was very difficult to tell where parts were being added because of all the black. Otherwise I was asking if there was such a version of the dial. I'm really surprised at how trouble-free the mechanism has been under more-or-less daily use; early on I had to add bushings to keep two gears from slipping. The Antikythera mechanism had the first known set of scientific dials or scales and was the most complex mechanism … This seems to happen a lot. For people that want to try this with a good quality 3d printer: Jonathan Blow draws some interesting implications of discoveries like this one in a recent talk: There is a really cool LEGO version someone built and you can see on YouTube. It's not as hard as you probably think it is. What’s your goal? Their ship was in a channel north of Crete, near the small island of Antikythera. Could 2 or 3 especially unlucky "city-killer" asteroids send us back to a pre-information-age society? In short, the dial works for any location on Earth. I decided to make a digital model of the Antikythera Mechanism, in order to try and understand better how it worked. Could you please share the Saros dial with me ?. To understand the Antikythera mechanism, what is really needed is more artefacts or texts on mechanical devices from the classical era. The Antikythera Mechanism, named for the area in Greece where it was discovered, is a mystery in the sense of the genius it required to design such a functional and accurate mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism and now you can make one also. This article has been rated as B-Class. Cars were perceived as no more than a high-priced toy for the rich. It would take another 1000 years of slow incremental improvements in manufacturing to be able to make one of these devices accurate enough to be useful. In the homework and labs you design and implement (in a simulator) at the gate level a 32-bit RISC CPU, except for memory. I've taken these, and can say they do a good job of teaching what they say they teach. On a related note: what is humanity's Bus Factor for creating a CPU? For example, the solar eclipse that just occurred (9 March), which I believe at least parts of Australia could see but North America could not, is on the dial. Does that make sense? The first is the way the original was made, in bronze sheet, cut into circles then filed with triangular teeth at regular spacing around the edge of each one and mounting on small bronze spindles. A whole lot of people know how to make a CPU. shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek Island of Antikythera over a century ago. to find out if you can build this MOC! OK, I assume that means 8 of part 3737. Sorry you must be logged in before you can do that. Yes, it does. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. I'm a science teacher and I think this will be a very important build for my students to see... © 2020 Rebrickable Pty Ltd. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies. I saw this thread and wondered what happened to that project. I perhaps should have been clearer what I think I was asking. One of the things most interesting to me about the mechanism is that it devotes a lot of gears and hardware to making small corrections which get completely overwhelmed by the inaccuracy of the manufacturing. If you really wanted to make society collapse resistant, including a manual about how to do so, a couple of tungsten carbide bits, and a couple of hacksaw blades with every car would probably do the trick. But Item 15087 always had at least one or two more scientifically inclined champions. Rebuilding an Intel class modern CPU or just making a crude one? It was probably also used for mapping and navigation. This a page charting the ups and downs of building working replicas of the Antikythera Mechanism. (I believe you are 11 hours ahead of UT, though feel free to check that.) I recommend 0.1 layer height and conservative settings for a slow, but high quality print. Much appreciated! The Clickspring creator hasn't provided updates for months on his Antikythera reconstruction, but recently he updated his patreon supporters of the reason why: He has discovered something new about the mechanism, previously unknown, that he is working on publishing. The Antikythera mechanism (/ ˌ æ n t ɪ k ɪ ˈ θ ɪər ə / AN-tə-kə-THEER-ə) is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the first analogue computer, the oldest known example of such a device used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. The oldest extant complex geared device was recovered from a first-century B.C. so amazing and complex! If you have a suitable Saros dial I would be grateful if you could share it. In short, Antikythera mechanism is the most ancient mechanical analog computer know to human kind so far. Been awhile since anyone's posted on this build. Fascinating! In 1900, a group of Greek sponge divers were sailing back to Symi, an island in the Rhodes region of Southern Greece. Thanks for the prompt reply. Must have taken a lot of hours to create, what with the extensive construction manual. , an island in the homework and labs you design and engineering greatly outstripped the methods. 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