There are three movements, controlled from 3 axles, and the gears on the axles have prime numbers of teeth (23, 43, 59). So technically the movements will only repeat every 58,351 turns of the small gear. There’s also a semi-random toggle on the head motion, so it will never really quite repeat. Almost all the parts press fit and/or lock together, so the whole thing can be disassembled to a pile of parts, then reassembled, adjusted, and set going again without tools.
Keith Newstead has been refining this design for twenty years. It shows. It’s gorgeous just sitting there, but when it starts to move…well, I think I audibly sighed. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
All joking aside, this thing may be the most beautiful piece of kinetic art I have ever seen. It has a Cartesian robot to draw 1s or 0s on the tape as needed, a rolling felt-covered drum for erasing symbols, a camera that can recognize what symbols have already been written, a bank of white LEDs to provide illumination for the camera, and a beautiful custom control panel.
