Mechanical circuits: electronics without electricity

Spintronics has mechanical resistors, inductors, transistors, diodes batteries and capacitors. When you connect them together with chains, they give a really good intuition for how circuits works.

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[SteveMould]

I wanted to make the circuit equivalent of Braess's Paradox but I'm not sure it's possible with these components. Might need to make some mods!

[itsdnk]

That little blue link in the chains makes such a difference in comprehension of the whole model. That was an extremely smart design choice. Little visual design choices like this are what make me happy or drive me nuts with stuff I see every day.

[RobertMilesAI]

I like how this captures the "everything is a resistor" "everything is a capacitor" "everything is an inductor" aspect of electrronics.
Like yeah the 'resistor' has a load of 'resistance', but all the rotating parts do. They also all have some mass and intertia, so they all have some 'inductance', etc

[LuckyLuke]

😂😂😂 "the Veritasium shaped elephant in the room" and later the unibrow (ElectroBoom) joke when talking about the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER. 😂 It was epic! The end segment was remined me of Alan Turing's mechanical computer (which broke the Enigma and helped to win WW2).

[FreeVally]

I just gave it to my 8year old son as a christmas present. And we both found it very cool to play with, and I as a electrical Engineer found it very intuitve and thought to my self that it must be possible to build a computer with enough ressources with all of that.
Well. Now youtube recommend me your video and you just have done the basics for that.

Great Job, great video!

[PlasmaChannel]

I've never clicked so fast. A physical description of an invisible process. Loved the breakdown!

[mikethewhizz]

One thing i absolutely love about this is its appearance. It's not some basic colors and simple flat shapes with sans serif text; the colors are metallic and blend well together, the pieces all have etched patterns in them, and the text matches. This is such an elegant, almost Victorian like toy

[olegvelichko]

Had me laughing like a a madman at "full bridge rectifier". Thanks for the video. Great content, as always!

[nopenoperson]

I've long thought of Inductors as "spinning up" like a flywheel, just to keep straight how they work in my head. It's really neat to see them make that analogy into reality.

[pentachronic]

This is when you realise how clever the Engineers were during the Steam era. This is what they used to regulate pressures etc.

[tomlaight]

I had an A-Level physics teacher who told me that if you were to have a 100% accurate model of something, then you would just have the thing itself. All diagrams, models, descriptions, analogies, abstractions etc. are going to have some level of imperfection about them because they are not the thing they are trying to explain, but in many cases that's exactly why they are helpful tools in allowing our meaty skull-contents to gain some understanding :)

[isaacbrooks]

14:57 he just had to pull out the unibrow for the full bridge rectifier!

[akshitkumar]

i was so confused as to weather i should take mechanical branch for my ug course thanks for making it clear . this is pure beauty. i have adhd and this is the only video i could watch over and over without getting bored and still learn something new. thankyou so much

[kevingraves]

The Electroboom reference when you discussed the full bridge rectifier really got me going. Overall this was a nifty demonstration!

[torhgrim]

I remember an electricity exercise in school where we compared a car shock absorber behavior with an RLC circuit and showed how with the right frequency of currents or bumps on the road, both could enter in resonance. It made me realize how every systems, mechanics, electric or chemicals are interconnected and basically about energy transfer. I still failed that class but had a nice mind blown moment :D

[jdgower]

I want to say two things; 1) Great video! I would love to play around with one of those kits.
2) I saw what you did @ ~15:00 with the sight gag about full bridge rectifiers, and I fully appreciated it. I just didn't want you to think your efforts went unnoticed.

[danmorgan]

I am incredibly late to this, but I wanted to mention how impressive I find these. I feel as if these could significantly lower the age at which children could learn about circuits, and perhaps just as importantly they can make learning about them fun.

[rngbunta]

I really appreciate you for making this analogy between electrical and mechanical systems. It really helps me better understand Control systems.

[gnorts_mr_alien]

oh my god what a golden idea. the creativity that went onto building the components as gear mechanisms and getting them to work together is nothing short of amazing.

[TheClintonio]

Steampunk entusiasts could easily take this idea and make a basic, real, steampunk computer. Maybe they'd need to scale it down somehow to make it practical but still. It'd be amazing.