About this corner
Tech Walks Before Dawn ends each walk with a sketch: “here is a game you should be able to play with this”. This corner picks up that sketch and builds the circuit and measures the numbers. The end of a walk is the door of the lab. We write the prediction first, then measure, and publish both whether or not they agree. The misses are usually where the interesting part is. Experiments are added in whatever order they come to mind, not in a course sequence — hence “anything”.
Drum and Sentry ― a neuron on a Basys 3, compared with an ammeter
Brought in from: the end of Walk 02, The Brain Runs on 20 Watts
Put one neuron between a button and an LED: press slowly and nothing happens; hammer it and it flashes once. Connect two and you have the same coincidence detector your brain uses to tell where a sound comes from. Then line up a hundred always-computing circuits (the drum) beside a hundred event-driven ones (the sentry) and watch what the ammeter does. The five “things to try” sketched in the walk, built for real.
Coming soonHow the lab works
Prediction first. Before measuring, we write down what should happen, in numbers. The walk's sketch becomes the prediction.
Every tool and step is written down. Which board, which meter, how many copies, how long we waited before reading. Anyone following the same steps should get the same numbers.
A miss is reported as a miss. Prediction and result side by side; if they differ, working out why is part of the experiment. The reason for the gap is usually the next walk.