*ONE-BIT ADDER
10/16/06

Jenny and I started this project with grand ideas about building a working adder, but in th end we never made it past an XOR gate. I have to give credit to Jenny for the brilliant idea of using velcro to differentiate between 1s and 0s in the system. (I get to take credit for the idea of making one black and the other white.) By making 1s and 0s different sides of the velcro connection, we ensured that 1s would never stick to other 1s and 0s would never stick to other 0s. We then designed a mechanism that would smash the two pieces together and drop them into a box. The box had a slot in the bottom that was just big enough to allow a single piece to fall through, but not two pieces stuck together. By shaking the box we were able to force single, unconnected bits to fall through the slot. If there was something left in the box after the shaking, we knew the two bits were different; if there was nothing left, we knew they were the same.

For further documentation of the one-bit adder project, please click on the image to visit my flickr photo set for this class.