Lovelace’s Delight is an advanced kit for building chonkier, complex devices. It’s approximately equal to 4x copies of the basic kit (The Babbage Box), plus some shiny bells and whistles.

• Some advanced roon types for making your circuits more compact and efficient
• A hopper module for storing and inputting data
• An adapter for powering the system via external brick systems, such as Lego Technic and Buxton’s Big Brickz

The kit is compatible with the upcoming roons2doom tutorial sequence, and unlocks some optional optimisations that aren’t available with simpler kits. The additional workspace and tile count makes it more practical to build multiple components from the tutorial sequence simultaneously, allowing you to connect them together to create more complex behaviour.

These tutorials require no prior knowledge, and walk you through building a computer from the ground up. You’ll start with basic logic gates; then learn how to stitch them together into more complicated systems. Finally, we’ll design a fully-general computer, and explore how to get the video game DOOM running purely on marbles.

Please note: the exact tiles in the kit may differ slightly from the photos, as we optimise the tileset for working with the tutorials.

buffer

The buffer is a roons module — a special gadget that plugs into the grid to provide advanced functionality. It allows you to:

• Store data twice as efficiently
• Easily set up inputs to your patterns
• Visualise outputs from your patterns
• Send marbles over long distances without manual setup
• Create arbitrarily-sized memory blocks in moments

You can see more info here.

advanced tiles

Lovelace’s Delight comes with a double helping of the advanced tiles from the Turing’s Revenge kit:

• The xor acts as a standalone XOR logic gate, saving you from having to build an XOR out of simpler roons
• The distributor makes it possible to work with marbles in half-positions, allowing for more compact designs
• The pocket provides a simple way to capture the output of a pattern, permanently locking a marble in place.

Plus some unique tiles:

• The checker provides an alternative to the switch roon, making it easier to check binary values in tight spaces
• The ejector performs an integrated “distribute-and-cross-over”. This option gives yo more control over the outputs of the xor and checker roons

axle adapter

The axle adapter makes roons interoperable with some kind of Danish toy brick system; who’s to say which one, it could be any of them.

When building bigger grids, it becomes harder to power all the devices using just the standard encabulator. The axle adapter allows you to build your own power mechanism. You might attach it to a motor, create a gearing system, or just build a large crank.

… or you could flip this on its head, and use the axle adapter to output power from the grid. For example, you might build a counter that ticks up by one every time the grid rotates, or a rotating arm that recycles marbles.

(Note: these are suggestions only. The kit doesn’t contain any external pieces that plug into the adapter; if you want to use it, you’ll need to provide your own pieces.)

trough

The trough is a small bucket that plugs into the edge of the grid. It can be used to catch marbles at the end of your pattern, or for disposing of waste marbles along the way, or just as a handy store of tiles and marbles. The upper portion of the trough detaches for easy access, revealing a second compartment underneath.