Modern constructs sans electronics!

I read an article circa 2001 that talked about the "Perishability of Digital Content", discussing how something written on a stone tablet a millennium ago is still readable, while something written into a floppy disk a decade before may no longer be readable. Unless you kept transferring the content to Zip disks, USB drives and cloud storage obsessively, the contents may be lost. In fact, I have a set of Tamil language documents I still have, created using a software called Murasu Anjal around that time. Now those files won't open anymore. Knowing that this may happen, I took the precaution of saving the Murasu Anjal program installer as well in my archives, thinking I can always install the program to be able to open the documents. But that program won't install in Windows-11 machines! If you have a Windows-98 machine lying around, PLMK. Perhaps I can use your help to retrieve those documents, some of which include poetry written by an uncle of mine who passed away a decade ago. We can debate about how stone tablets and electronic documents are different, how efficient digital storage is and so on, but can't deny the underlying point related to perishability! 

I have spent my career working in the semiconductor industry, and I am truly fascinated by how far we have come in our own lifetime and what a transformation it has been to the human civilization as a whole. But I find complicated, beautiful non-electronic constructions equally fascinating and almost mesmerizing. While there is so much to discuss, and one can easily write a book on this topic, will sample just four items and stop. Please click through each link, without which this post is useless

I was talking to two of my cousins over the weekend, who are literally lot more qualified than I am on these topics. My cousin Sundar Narasimhan pointed me to this video, which is a bit dated (and so audio quality is not that great), related to passive dynamic bipedal walking. Pretty neat when you realize the bipedal construct is walking down the bench, simply due to incline using gravity! This led to my other cousin Ravi Sundaram to point us to this Veritasium video discussing the Stranderbeest. I came to know about it few years ago via a Simpsons TV show reference, that is mentioned in the Veritasium video as well. There are tons of videos online that discuss the construction details. But the Veritasium video nicely summarizes the project for someone with passing interest. 

That made me remember a project I was involved in few years ago, as a coach for a middle school Science Olympiad team. Here are the rules and starting point for that project called "Battery Buggy". Basic goal is to build a small battery powered vehicle, that travel a set distance and stops on its own, without any electronics/remote control involved. Unlike other projects discussed, this one involves batteries and electric motor, but still no electronics. Please read through the rules carefully as it may be difficult to fully understand all the details in one quick reading. Then see how you'd design the vehicle. Most difficult parts are 

- Making the vehicle stop on its own (i.e. no electronics/remote control allowed) after it traverses a set distance. This distance can be anywhere between 9 and 12 meters, specified by the judges on the day of the competition. 

- For bonus points making the vehicle travel in an arc to reach the same point. 

After you have thought through and have come up with some ideas, you can look at this link which has lot more details of our design. It would be good to watch through each video in chronological order so that you can see the progress we made slowly week after week. If you simply see the final version/run, lot of pain we went through will all be lost, which is what is important for learning. For example, you can see the initial photos/videos to understand how the vehicle stops on its own; how we achieved the arc comes much later. I have included some pictures of the competition, my daughter and her teammate winning medals. This is just to show you the number of competitions we have to attend to get to the state final, where we finished at number 2, missing first place just by couple of points. Since the teams finishing in third place was way behind, we practically tied for the state first finish! 

The three cases above (bipedal walker, Stranderbeest, and battery buggy) were interesting in slightly differing ways from science/construction points of view. But the most artistically beautiful construct is the evolution of mechanical sculptures designed over the years by a single engineer named David Roy. Blending his engineering skills with his sublime artistic skills, he has created a series of kinetic sculptures using no electricity or motors that can be hung on the wall as mesmerizing art pieces! This video put together by Wired very nicely summarizes all I'd like to explain! 

As I wrote in the beginning, there are many more projects of similar kind we can talk about. But PLMK if you were personally involved, designed, developed any such moving/dynamic constructs that did not use electronics.