Mechanical logic gates

[Swatopluk]

You're welcome.  

If you wanted weights that didn't need to be removed completely, you could put some pins out either side of each weight which would line up with matching slots.  A 1/4 turn when the weight was mostly retracted would support in the 0 position, and a quick turn would drop it back to 1.

Admittedly, I do not understand what you say here. I am not very good at turning a described mechanism into a mental image.
A slight (non-fatal) flaw: the pressure point on the balance have to be wider (or the balance arms telescopic) to account for the 'shortening' in the projection (see sketch).

[Aggie]

Yes, if you wanted the weights to travel vertically, that would be a necessity.  Actually, it's something I overlooked in suggesting the pin-locks, but would be doubly necessary for that to work.  See attachment (not to scale).

I've always enjoyed fussing around with simple mechanics and/or hydraulics. MB seems to have insight into my high school days, but he'd have to retitle himself as NentalGlock for my college/tech school years.   

[Swatopluk]

Building in a mechanism to rotate the weights would make the mechanism too complicated in my view.
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If the output pin shall move as far as the primary input pins, it will be necessary to attach proportional levers as in one of my sketches above.
Remember the upswing of the balance on the one side must not interfere with the input pin on that side, therefore the input pins must move twice the distance the balance arms (and in result the output pin) do.

[Aggie]

Building in a mechanism to rotate the weights would make the mechanism too complicated in my view.

Are you supporting Intelligent Design?  I like to think that I inherited the five mechanisms on each arm (which I intended to use for lifting and rotating the weights) from my primate lineage.

It's basically a very simple way to lock a weight in the 0 position without having to completely remove it.

[Swatopluk]

But can you turn ten of them at the same time, turn the crank and register the output of the machine? And doing all of that faster than encoding the message by hand?

[Aggie]

Ah, I see.... I think simply and only on the basis of one logic gate.

In the context of a larger mechanical unit, which would be able to mechanically lift and lower each weight, there's absolutely no point in putting the pins in place.  I was considering only that they would be dropped in by hand, which would require keeping track of a lot of fiddly little weights if one was completely removing them.

[Darlica]

What are you building?

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[Swatopluk]

Another fake Byzantine Cipher machine

[Darlica]

Ooooh!

[Swatopluk]

First images to-morrow.
No, I am not physically building it, just designing

[Darlica]

Awww.

I was thinking of some wondrous Cipher machine built in to a little box of the kind Po´9 makes...

[Swatopluk]

Here's the keyboard design that turns letters into 5-bit signals and feeds them into the XOR gates
The code wheel or chain (images forthcoming) yields the other input of the XOR gates.
The output is fed into a mechnical display or letter dispenser (pictures forthcoming).
Retyping the coded messages in to the keyboard (provided the code wheel is in the same starting position) yields the original message.

[Swatopluk]

And here is the display.
The output of the XOR gates pushes levers that lift the punched plates.
The punching pattern is chosen in a way that always only one letter on the last plate is visible.
Can also be constructed in a way that a coin or ball with the letter falls through the only available hole. That would require rather thin plates though.

[Swatopluk]

Here's the last piece: The Code Wheel

The code platelets are stuck on pins on the circumference of the wheel able to rotate around the pins. (left sketch)
The wedge presses the passing platelet against the circumference, so the code pins stick out through slits and act on the levers connected to the XOR gates.
The wheel is connected to the keyboard, so that each time a key is pressed down the wheel moves one step forward (mechanism could be analogue to the escapement in a pendulum clock).
The key length of the cipher is equal to the number of pins on the wheel = the number of code platelets.
A longer key could be facilitated by using the same principle but with a chain of platelets running over cogwheels.
the whole wheel ensemble can be housed in a closed box with only the levers sticking out. The machine operator would therefore not necessarily know the key sequence. The display/output (see previous post) could also face away from the keyboard operator for the same purpose.

The whole cipher machine could also work without the keyboard. In that case the message to be coded would be constructed from a chain of platelets with holes between the pins. This chain would run parallel to the code wheel, so the pins of the code platelets stick through the holes of the message platelets and act on the XOR gates. This might even allow to skip the transmission levers (the pins acting directly).
Sketch of the message (top) and code platelets (bottom) to the right