Shoooot...and I was wondering if there is a simple program for simple guys like me..

 

Well, it's simple compared to autocad and SolidWorks. And that's my main concern.
It was always too simple for me to build what I exactly wanted.

The cool thing is that you can print the schematics of your build afterwards.

 

Boolean, or digital, is represented as on or off, 1 or 0, yes or no, yin or yang

A battery is analog because is has a constantly changing, (and if rechargeable) repeatable, voltage.

A digital display is a display whose components can only be On or Off.

Lcd has "segments" in the layout that can only be on or off..hence a digital DISPLAY

Unlike a clockface which has a constant physically changing pointer, that is repeatable.

A gear, depending on shape, can be considered a digital piece. If there are ramps on the teeth, then it is an analog gear, with infinitely changing, but repeatable results.

A ramp has an infinite number of "points" on the way up and down.

A digital gear has no ramp, so it is onlt in 1 of 2 states.

EVERY circuit in this world is analog/digital.

The crystal or RC timers are analog, filtered to be digital.

Science, and marketing, had to draw a line somewhere. I dont know exactly where that line is, but if a device can go from 1 to 0 at a rate that the other components in the circuit do not "see" the "in-between" then it is classified as digital.

 

An escapement-regulated gear typically has only two states. One can envision other regulator mechanisms to get rid of the continuous variable issue too. Does that make the gear train digital? Remember your old schoolroom clock, or the one shown in old movies? The second hand moved in discrete steps, not continuously. PS: I didn't spend a lot of time in the Principal's office, but the clock definitely is one thing that intrigued me.

I agree that the only real reason to describe something as digital is probably marketing. The Antikythera mechanism is remarkable, regardless of whether it is considered digital or analog.

John

 

I agree that the only real reason to describe something as digital is probably marketing. The Antikythera mechanism is remarkable, regardless of whether it is considered digital or analog.

John

Agreed. The gear design and construction of the original is amazing.

 

And we couldn't see through the rusted case until very recently, when they x-ray scanned it and managed to decrypt it.

 

Remember, a digital system need not have two states. In fact, you can get any number of states, but the requirement is that the number of states is not infinite. The problem with this definition is that everything is digital, because in theory the individual electrons in a wire are discrete. Although there might be trillions and quadrillions (scientific terminology) of them, they are still countable. So you obviously have to define some kind of cut-off point at which you consider something analog or digital.