TechLahore

Any Sign ups?? or any one can bring their project? What is the deadline? What exactly means “on the lines of Prof. Harry Porter’s remarkable relay computer”? At least provide some questionare or writeup guiding contestants to understand the problem which they will address in constructing the device.

Ok. Here’s more “rules”:

1. No need to sign up – you can email me if you want to let me know you’re working on the project, or just put the name of your team up here in the comment area.

2. I’ll be generous and give competitors a lot of time. I’ll offer the reward to the team that completes the project FIRST; between now and August 1st. BUT, there is no prize for coming in second or third etc.

3. The purpose of the project is to build an electro-mechanical relay computer. Which is really a fancy way of saying that I want you to build a very very simple CPU and memory core out of relays and a small amount of support circuitry. The basic components will be:

1) A clock that drives the CPU
2) An ALU or Arithmetic Logic Unit
3) Registers
4) Program Counter
5) Memory
6) A Bus that connects everything together
7) Some output mechanism (LEDs are fine) that shows what is present on the bus and in the registers/PC etc.

Your computer will implement a basic instruction set; at minimum, it should include arithmetic instructions (INC, DEC etc.), memory and register manipulation instructions (MOV etc.) and conditional/unconditional jumps (JMP etc.)

You’ll also have some sort of flip-switch based means to “load” data into registers and memory. Harry is seen doing exactly that in the early parts of the video I included in the post.

I can get into a detailed lecture on what the system needs to do, but like I said, Harry Porter already has a lot of details on what he’s built. If you are unsure as to whether your particular take on Harry’s architecture will “qualify” simply send me a note or write in the comments area here. If you have some deviations/exceptions you’d like to clarify with me prior to starting your project, that’s fine. Let me know what they are and I’ll tell you if they will fly or not.

Once everything is built out, I’d like to donate the system to a children’s organization where it will be on public display. Therefore, please give some consideration to the way things “look”. The system should be reasonably neat, well labeled, documented and “enclosable” in wood/glass cabinets like Harry’s system is.

Does that help?

[...] (and projects) with you when I asked you to“supercharge your kids’ minds“. Or when I attempted to financially incent students of electrical engineering and computer science to build something meaningful and [...]