The interactive collection
Extraordinary machines.
Yours to explore.
65 interactive machine, instrument, and computational models spanning three centuries. Explore their mechanisms, vary selected parameters, and inspect the assumptions behind each simulation.
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Regulator 30 Skeleton Clock
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Showing 65 of 65 exhibits
Regulator 30 Skeleton Clock
A spring-driven skeleton clock whose escape wheel is solved from pallet contact: one regulator time turns every wheel and hand.
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Double-Acting Steam Engine
A cutaway engine coupling steam, a crank and a spring-loaded governor in one physical model.
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Babbage Difference Engine No. 2
Crank eight columns of decimal wheels that tabulate polynomials, carry digit by digit and print their own results.
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THERMION Vacuum Electronics Laboratory
A dual triode and a twin diode on one bench: solve their circuits, read the local field and open the reconstructed assemblies.
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Silent-Era Film Projector
A four-slot Geneva mechanism indexes film while a synchronized shutter masks each modeled pull-down.
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Ion Lab: Bainbridge Mass Spectrometer
Send ions through a crossed-field velocity selector and a 180° magnet, then read their mass-to-charge ratio from where each one lands.
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The Wireless Workshop
A two-valve 1920s receiver reconstruction with a numerical AM detector laboratory, a station dial for online broadcasts and a captioned principles film.
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Er Steam Lab: From Fire to Rail
A late Polish-built Er 0-10-0 freight locomotive as a running engineering model — raise steam, open the regulator and watch cylinder pressure become wheel torque.
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Differential Analyzer — Mechanical Calculus
Four modeled wheel-and-disk integrators connect shaft variables to numerical solutions and plotted traces.
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Three-Rotor Cipher Machine
Configure three rotors, ring settings, a reflector, and a plugboard, then trace each reciprocal substitution.
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Front-Strike Mechanical Typewriter
A working front-strike typewriter reconstruction: follow every key through its linkage, ribbon contact and carriage advance.
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Pinwheel Mechanical Calculator
Set a pinwheel rotor, turn the crank, and follow decimal registers and modeled carries.
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Pinwheel Calculator Teaching Model
Follow input pins, stored carries, clearing shafts and result back-transfer through a spatial teaching model.
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Three-Wire Core Memory
Operate 4,096 twelve-bit words and follow magnetic reversal, whole-plane sensing, inhibition, and restoration.
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Light Turbine Helicopter · Drivetrain
From a single-shaft turbine through two planetary stages to the main rotor and variable-pitch tail rotor.
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CRT Oscilloscope
An electron beam steered by deflection plates, drawing waveforms on phosphor.
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Variable-Geometry Turbocharger
One shaft, two wheels and nine variable vanes. Inspect the rebuilt assembly and follow the boost response.
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Personal Cassette Player
The original personal stereo. Open the case and follow the music.
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OMNIVOX 2000 CRT Console
A fictional early-1980s television-and-console scene exposes representative CRT components and raster effects.
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Nine-Pin Dot-Matrix Printer
Step through an ESC/P-inspired byte stream as a modeled latch maps columns to a nine-pin print head.
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FABRIC: The FPGA Learning Lab
Program sixteen logic cells, route their inputs and clock their registers, then watch configuration become a working circuit, event by event.
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Digit Lab — Learn from Handwriting
Draw a digit, follow a real neural network, and measure how training changes its predictions.
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The White-Box — A Neural Net With Nothing to Hide
A 16–2–2 classifier that exposes its weighted sums, ReLU activations, probabilities, loss, and gradients.
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TRACTUS: Inside a 4×4 Drivetrain
Follow power through an off-road 4×4’s part-time transfer case, solid axles and selectable lockers, with the real tooth ratio on every gear.
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The Last Moving Part
Two spinning platters, a voice-coil arm, and a modeled FAT workflow — follow files from clusters to a magnetic-bit visualization.
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Electric Crossover Front Axle — Suspension & Steering
Operate a reconstructed front axle: steer the rack, move the suspension, and inspect the ball-screw assist path.
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Two-Motor Hybrid Powertrain
A first-generation two-motor hybrid sedan rebuilt from teardown measurements: engine, electric machines, transaxle, PCU and battery on one clock.
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Photon Light Stories
Follow light through four display technologies, then open a layered 3D laboratory to inspect how each image is made.
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Commercial Mall Escalator
Twin step chains, two roller tracks that keep every tread level, and handrails driven at step speed.
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Hand-Wound Openwork Watch
A mainspring, a going train of linked ratios, a lever escapement and a breathing hairspring behind open bridges.
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Optomechanical Ball Mouse
A rubber ball, two slotted-disk encoders read in quadrature, and a three-byte PS/2 report for every movement.
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Three-Spool Turbofan
One fan, fifteen compressor and turbine stages, three concentric shafts, and a gas path you can watch.
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Marble Binary Computer
A binary computer with no electricity in it: thirty glass marbles fall through a playfield of flip-flops and do arithmetic.
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The First Disk File, 1956
Fifty spinning disks, one arm, and the first machine that could reach any record without passing the others first.
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Scroll Wheel & Optical Encoder
Three mechanisms share one axle: a tire your finger turns, a cam that makes the clicks, and a slotted disk that tells the computer which way.
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Desktop Hard Disk
A mechanism and a magnetic surface on different clocks: milliseconds to reach a track, nanoseconds for the bits to pass.
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Buckling-Spring Keyboard
Click a key and the whole chain runs: a spring buckles, a contact closes, the controller scans, and only then does the text change.
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Globus IMP Navigation Instrument
Set by hand and driven by sequencer pulses, this instrument predicted where a Voskhod crew was with gears, cams and a differential — it never measured it.
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LIGO Gravitational-Wave Detector
Two four-kilometer laser arms, recycling mirrors, a dark port and a synthetic compact-binary waveform make differential strain measurable.
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The Self-Carving Piston — Generative Design
A SIMP topology optimizer redistributes material in a piston-shaped design domain under modeled loads and supports.
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EUV Lithography Scanner
Follow the EUV scanner architecture from tin plasma to a patterned wafer. Open a subsystem to inspect its physical scale and operating principle.
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Megaphragma — Synthetic Sensorimotor Model
About 7,400 model spiking units connect a simplified eye to a qualitative flight controller.
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Continuous Color Inkjet Plotter
Follow three continuous ink jets as a rotating drum turns an image into cyan, magenta and yellow addresses on paper.
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EMS Maglev Train
A five-car EMS maglev train lifts off its skids, locks its gap and departs on a long-stator motor built into the guideway.
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Cavendish Torsion Balance — Weighing the World
A source-based reconstruction of Cavendish’s torsion balance: move the lead masses, read the telescope, and fit G from recorded angles.
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Cloud & Bubble Chambers
A particle passes in nanoseconds. The medium makes its path visible.
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STRATUM / 01 — Desktop 3D Printer
Slice a solid into layers, heat the nozzle, and follow one belt-driven toolpath from mesh to melted bead.
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VECTOR Hybrid Stepper Motor
Two phases, fifty teeth and one axial magnet: current commutates first, then torque carries the rotor one 1.8° step.
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Three-Phase Induction Motor Laboratory
Three distributed windings, a rotating field and a closed aluminum cage turn slip into torque, solved from the same electrical and mechanical state.
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Higgs Boson Detector
Follow one simulated collision from sensor hits to a reconstructed mass, then collect thousands to see why one candidate is never a discovery.
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Michelson–Morley Interferometer, 1887
Turn a mercury-floated stone interferometer and compare the stationary-aether prediction with the missing fringe shift.
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Brushed DC Motor Laboratory
Rebuild a 2-, 3- or 4-tooth brushed DC motor and watch commutation, load, stall and coasting come out of one solved circuit.
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Laser Printer
A laser writes an invisible charge image; toner, transfer and heat make it a print.
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Group 3 Fax Machine Pair
A page leaves as reflected light, crosses a telephone line as a changing voltage, and comes back as heat on new paper, one row at a time.
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Brushless DC Motor — Hall-Commutated Laboratory
Three Hall sensors, a six-switch bridge and a floating-star winding turn DC into rotation, with back EMF, reversal and phase faults solved rather than animated.
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Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment
Time charged oil droplets between two brass plates and infer each droplet's charge from its fall and rise, on a bench or a virtual Earth.
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LINE — Flatbed Scanner Laboratory
Follow light from a still page through three mirrors and a lens onto a color CCD, and watch an image assemble one registered RGB row at a time.
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Big Ben and the Great Clock of Westminster
Three falling weights, a four-second pendulum and Denison’s gravity escapement: follow every joule from the weights to four dials and the Westminster bells.
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Five-Axis CNC Machining Cell
Plan a job, run it block by block and watch three linear and two rotary axes carve a part out of a stock that remembers every cut.
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CNC Turning Lab: Two-Axis Lathe
Turn a bar on a two-axis lathe: a spinning workpiece, a fixed cutting edge and a stock model that keeps every cut you make.
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Eight-Speed Automatic Transmission Laboratory
Inspect four interconnected planetary sets, follow every clutch exchange, and compare fluid coupling with mechanical lock-up.
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Five-Speed Manual Transmission Laboratory
Follow the clutch, synchronizer and selector through a real shift, with numbered torque paths derived from contact state.
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Automotive HVAC Laboratory
Trace three separate fluid circuits, inspect a seven-piston compressor, and compare cooling, heating and defogging.
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EV Car Brake System Laboratory
Follow pedal force, hydraulic pressure and regenerative recovery through one connected brake system.
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EV Car Thermal System Laboratory
Follow heat through a heat pump, an eight-port coolant valve, and the cabin, battery and drive units of an electric car.
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From pendulums to photolithography
The collection opens with a regulator clock and explores mechanisms, control, computation, measurement, and manufacturing, from brass machinery to EUV lithography. Continue with the Logic Lab or Relay Lab to construct related systems.
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