Assignment 3: Water Binary Adder: Process/Reflection
Approaching the task to create a binary adding machine is was extremely overwhelming... But throughout the process, we learned alot about how to manifest conceptual systems into applicable scenario in order to achieve measurable results. The tick was to accurately construct each water logic gate and delicately connect it to the following gate otherwise, a small issue in the beginning exponentially grows into a bigger problem as the water is propagating through the system.
Beginning with testing individual gates, it was hard enough to control the flow of water from one gate to the other in a simple 2-gate assembly. As we conducted tests, we rapidly came to the realization that water was flowing inconsistently and that it would be incredibly difficult to create an open-loop system where water is released from the top and merely collected at the bottom. such system would mean that water would have to exit the tubes at EXACTLY the same instance and collide at EXACTLY the same force in order to combine and go through the AND gate. Also, learning from previous lessons and mistakes that students have made in the past, it became obvious that designing such a system becomes an issue of calculating speed of water and the distance it has to travel in the tube in order to achieve the correct outcome.
After thorough consideration, we were able to arrive at a solution that takes away the necessity of having simultaneous exiting of water by creating a closed-loop system that has water continuously flowing through it. Such system self corrects and reaches a state of equilibrium after a certain amount of time. Imaging water being pumped from a container at the bottom and that same water runs through the binary adding machine and is released in that same container. This closed-loop design allowed us to focus our attention on crafting the best water gate instead of spending hours matching waterline distances.
If water is coming out of one end only when it is supposed to be coming out of 2 ends for the binary addition to occur, the pumped water will eventually reach the second tube and flow out and into the AND gate.
Final prototype assembly in action
Crafting the final prototype required thinking about the overall look of the binary adding machine and not only its function. Because of that, we chose to move forward with a design that was intuitively diagrammatic in nature where the gates were laid out based on a “half-adder” scheme. Since the distances between gate inputs and outputs was no longer an issue due to the closed-loop system, we were able to map the vinyl tubing on the board in such a way that told a story about how binary mechanical adding works.
Seeing the system run became a lesson of how a half-adder adds the binary inputs and how a carry bit is outputted as information from one half-adder into the next AND gate connecting the half-adders into a full adding system.
