Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Minivac 601 Simulator - a 1961 Relay Computer
Hey HN! I'm very proud of sharing this project with you all, after ~2 years of starts and stops, and about 5 different attempts at making it. Context/history: In 1961, the Minivac 601 [0], an educational electronics kit - somewhat similar to those "300 circuits in one" you may have had growing up as I did - was created by none other than Claude Shannon. The Minivac is disarmingly simple: it consists roughly speaking of 6 relays, 12 lights, 6 buttons, and a motorized wheel. You'd think that it couldn't really do much. Well, amazingly, it can do a lot. You can wire up the components in a…
The Minivac 601 Simulator is a digital recreation of Claude Shannon's 1961 educational electronics kit, which used relays, lights, buttons, and a motorized wheel to perform computing tasks. The simulator allows users… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hello, we're Max and Byran from MUREX Robotics, a high school robotics team from Exeter, New Hampshire. We are super proud to have made this open source piece of technology! It is only 6.9 dollars (actually!) from JLCPCB :) I hope you like it. You can find us at [email protected] and [email protected] as well if you have any questions. We will be putting a small run of these boards for sale somewhere (we have <25 units of stock), probably for $10+shipping. Let us know if you're interested in more! Board files for everything we make is here:…
2024 · docs.murexrobotics.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
2024 · paulbupejr.com · its alternatives →
- 3
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Educational online virtual electricity lab, try for free
2024 · experimenters.app · its alternatives →
- 5
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Thimble.io provides that balance and goes a step further by introducing a more personal and flexible approach to keep kids engaged: live and on-demand classes.
2016 · thimble.io · its alternatives →
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I built a mechanical computer kit: https://whomtech.com/show-hn tl;dr: it's a cellular automaton on a "loom" of alternating bars, using contoured tiles to guide marbles through logic gates. It's not just "Turing complete, job done"; I've tried to make it actually practical. Devices are compact, e.g. you can fit a binary adder into a 3cm square. It took me nearly two years and dozens of different approaches. There's a sequence of interactive tutorials to try out, demo videos, and a janky simulator. I've also sent out a few prototype kits and have some more ready to go. Please…
2025 · whomtech.com · its alternatives →
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As part of a little research and also some fun I decided to try my hand at seeing how small of an ESP32 board I can make with functioning WiFi.
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 10BM
2021 · simulators.drbasheers.com · its alternatives →
- 11CO
Explore Digital circuits online with CircuitVerse. With our easy to use simulator interface, you will be building circuits in no time.
2018 · circuitverse.org · its alternatives →
- 12AS
Lots of fun to do. I would have not taken the time without the speedup provided by Claude. https://andyrosa.github.io/Sinclaude/simulator.html
2025 · its alternatives →
- 13IU
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 14BA
I am a Dutch high school student and last year I had to do a large project of my own choice. Together with two other guys I decided to do a project about digital logic. We had an ambitious plan: building an 8-bits computer. At that time I started learning programming and I already knew some HTML and CSS. So we decided to not build a physical computer, but one running in a self-built simulator. I was going to build the simulator, the other guys took care of the computer. I was hard, our school hadn't taught us anything about computers and programming so we had to learn everything ourselves.…
2017 · its alternatives →
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Arduino▲111Dual-brain edge AI computer by Qualcomm and Arduino
2014 · arduino.cc · its alternatives →
- 16TM
Hey HN, we just released the 1.0 of the MonTana Mini Computer (MTMC-16), a virtual teaching computer to help students understand how low level computing works. It is a 16 bit computer with only 4k of ram, but we've made some design choices that help maximize what you can accomplish with the limited hardware https://mtmc.cs.montana.edu/ It is written in java (sorry) and provides a web interface that has: - a blinken-lighten display for registers - a memory view with different filters you can apply - a Gameboy-like game pad - a console you can use to interact with the computer…
2025 · mtmc.cs.montana.edu · its alternatives →
- 17Scratchboard▲146
Create, simulate, and collaborate on digital circuits
2025 · scratchboard.io · its alternatives →
- 18
Origin▲97Power tool w/ computer vision + real-time motor control
2016 · shapertools.com · its alternatives →
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An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.
2018 · nandgame.com · its alternatives →
- 22MD
2020 · dropbox.com · its alternatives →
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A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →