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INSIDE those OLD pinball machines (www.youtube.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

First, wear your dust mask. Who knows where these machines have been?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Very pretty stuff. I particularly recommend Ken Shirriff's Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer:

He goes into detail about how non-linear equations are implemented using shaped cam gears (and how such functions can be difference-encoded against linear forms). It's insane.

And because it’s analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors.

Eh, I'd say that runout and stiction are their own demons with potentially more bias than those error types :) Not to mention temperature sensitivity -- hot days will give different answers to the equations!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Eh, I'd say that runout and stiction are their own demons with potentially more bias than those error types :) Not to mention temperature sensitivity -- hot days will give different answers to the equations!

Ha, oh yeh. Good point.
A bit of dirt throwing off the calculations.