Video of Lego Antikythera Mechanism

[DLuders]

Let's go back in time -- to 100 B.C. in Ancient Greece....

NatureVideoChannel posted this

of "The [Lego] Antikythera Mechanism: http://bit.ly/fm4oFK is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. 

In 2010, we built a fully-functional replica out of Lego. 

Sponsored by Digital Science: http://www.digital-science.com/, a new division of Macmillan Publishers that provides technology solutions for researchers. Available under a CC-BY-3.0-Unported license."

Here's an animation of the Sun-Moon Assembly: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/whatsnew/column/antikytheraI-0400/kyth5.html .

Here's the "behind the scenes" YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSzQ9H6kwCM

Edited December 10, 2010 by DLuders

[teflon]

This is quite amazing. I am impressed by using differential gears to get odd ratios like 5/19th. I haven't seen something like that. And there is a history touch (like Babbage's differential engine), which is great for my taste.

The only down side for me is that I cannot recreate this without some better blueprints. Did the Greeks used LDraw or LDD 0.09alpha1?

[Burf2000]

This is quite amazing. I am impressed by using differential gears to get odd ratios like 5/19th. I haven't seen something like that. And there is a history touch (like Babbage's differential engine), which is great for my taste.

The only down side for me is that I cannot recreate this without some better blueprints. Did the Greeks used LDraw or LDD 0.09alpha1?

Thats very cool, wonder if they will release instructions lol

[Jurgen Krooshoop]

I've seen many Technic creations, but this one is really mind-blowing. And the story behind it is very fascinating as well.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Jurgen Krooshoop

[RohanBeckett]

Amazing creation... and just as amazing filming, and editing...

love the behind the scenes video that follows it.... unbelievable how much work goes into something like that!

(Just a *bit* more complex that the original Ideas book Lego clock, and the one that popped up here a month or so ago!!)

RB

[grindinggears]

Wow, this is an epic creation. What a luck that it got such a professional video!

Greek engineers (well, mavbe they were in fact Babylonian) were so much ahead of their time and it's a real pity that much of their findings didn't advance in the following 2000 years or even got lost.

There is another technical device from that time which I find very remarkable:

The first programmable ROBOT!

It was used in theatre and used rope looped around an axle to follow certain paths which could be programmed before a play.

This thing was invented by Heron (10-70 AD) who was a pure genius and designed many other mind-blowing mechanisms.

That robot is driven by weights which go down over a period of time and drag a rope that is looped around the axles of the left and right wheel of the robot.

The programming works as following: The engineer spins the rope around the axle to let the device drive forward. To let it drive backwards he sticks a pin into the axle, spins the rope around it and thus reverses the direction of the axle. Controlling both axles independently gave him the possibillity to turn the robot.

That is such a big amount of ingenuity, it totally amazes me.

What do you think about this device? Was it really a robot? And why has it been so long(2000 years!) until robotics made some better progress?

There is a nice article about that thing in German. Click here to read it.

And here is an automatically translated English version of it.

[DLuders]

@ grindinggears: Hero of Alexandria would be proud to know that there has been a Lego replica of his first programmable robot:

[grindinggears]

@ grindinggears: Hero of Alexandria would be proud to know that there has been a Lego replica of his first programmable robot:

That is so cool! Looking at this replica made me think about creating my own version. To do the rope programming I could mount liftarms on the drive axle with these two elements: 1, 2

Then I can put some pins inside the liftarms, spin the rope around them and thus programm my own moving sequence.

To not let the weight just fall down in a few moments I will gear it up and thus separate the rope of the weight and the driven axle. This will give me some driving power for a long run without building such a high "tower on wheels".

Maybe there is an ambassador that could suggest the idea of making such a heron-robot to LEGO for their education line. It would give children a good entrance to Mindstorms as it is low-cost and more robust.

Well, it's getting somewhat offtopic, I will open a new thread if I really build my own rope-robot.

[sverre]

I saw this yesterday, and was totally blown away by it! Really really well done. Both construction and video! We need instructions for it!!! :)

[Jurgen Krooshoop]

I saw this yesterday, and was totally blown away by it! Really really well done. Both construction and video! We need instructions for it!!! :)

Instrucions would be sooooo great !! If there were instructions I'd definately try building it.

[yumiyoshi]

Feynman would be proud.

Amazing moc!

[grindinggears]

Instrucions would be sooooo great !! If there were instructions I'd definately try building it.

Maybe this site containing the gear ratios can help you to build your own version

http://www.greatdreams.com/numbers/jerry/antmec/antmec.htm

but they are so confusing This will certainly take a while to understand.

This site contains some nice documentation af the AM too:

http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/whatsnew/column/antikytheraI-0400/kyth1.html

Maybe we can contact the original builder Andrew Carol. If he could give us pictures of every gear stage,

making your own Antikythera Mechanism would be a lot easier then.

I was in Greece a few years ago and also saw that mechanism in the national museum of Athens. I was astonished to see that Greece (or Babylonian) engineers designed so precise gears.

But now I fully understand what a masterpiece of Astronomy, Mathematics and Engineering this thing is because of this video.

Thank you Andrew!

Edit:

What a coincidence! I just found Andrew Carols' documentation of that mechanism:

http://acarol.woz.org/antikythera_mechanism.html

There is also the Difference Computer of Babbage on his homepage

And maybe we should head over to this thread at reddit.com to praise Carol's creation.

Edited December 12, 2010 by grindinggears

[JunkstyleGio]

Absolutely awesome!

Maybe this could be the new flagship for 2h2011?

[teflon]

Gosh, would be nice to have a non-toy for a flagship but I am sure this will not happen anywhere soon. But I am wondering what is Andrew building now. The only downside is that it takes him quite a lot time to build such a great things.

I think this creation is also very inspirational. I am always thinking about creating some nice little scientific instruments. I guess I have to go back to the drawing board to get some of this ideas out of my head.

[Jetro]

Still only barely enough documentation available to attempt to reverse engineer this beauty. I'd love to give it a try though.

[rgbrown]

(Just a *bit* more complex that the original Ideas book Lego clock, and the one that popped up here a month or so ago!!)

More complex, yes. More difficult, not really.

This model is fundamentally just a large-scale exercise in gear combinations (i.e. elementary arithmetic). The difficulty in building it is one of getting all the gears to fit in a frame that is not too big, with the right axles protruding from the right places. And yes, figuring that out and building it must have been hard work. (I'm ignoring the work that has gone into calculating the dial patterns, etc, which is a different kettle of fish)

The difficulty in building an efficient mechanical clock is to design a movement that minimises frictional losses, and an escapement that efficiently transfers just the right amount of energy to the pendulum per cycle without losing much. Much more design scope and a much more difficult and open-ended problem, in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong though, this is an incredible creation, and a nice complement to the recent research on the device.

[Stank]

I saw that video before and i have to say AWESOME! Yes it's just a gear mechanism but it's awesome! Now we will have to wait until 2024 to see if it works! Has anybody tried to reverse engineer it?

EDIT: Small grammatical errors.

Edited January 24, 2011 by Stank