Floor 0 · basement · 3 exhibits
The Workshop
Before there's thinking, there's electricity. Wire it up and watch it flow.
Current, voltage, components — a circuit is just electrons pushed round a loop — and the bytes-on-a-wire frames a sensor speaks, checksummed so a wire can't lie. The physical floor everything above stands on.
Build-a-Circuit
Clip a loop, push electrons round it, and light a real lamp.
Before there's thinking, there's electricity. Wire up a loop and watch it flow.
How deep would you like to go?
show me · the plain-English storyElectricity flows when there's an unbroken loop out of the battery, through the parts, and back again. The battery pushes (that push is the voltage); how much flows is the current. The resistor slows the flow, and the LED lights only when enough current runs through it the right way.
Wow — Every voltage and milliamp you see is solved live from your own wiring by a real circuit simulator — nothing here is a video, and nothing is faked.
Try this — Load the LED + resistor circuit, then drag the resistor's value up. Watch the current — and the LED's brightness — fall as you make the path harder to push through.
What's really happening · A real DC circuit simulator built from scratch: it collapses your wiring into electrical nets, stamps each component into a Modified Nodal Analysis system (a resistor's conductance, a battery's ideal-source row, an LED's piecewise-linear diode), and solves the linear system with hand-written Gaussian elimination — iterating the LED on/off states to consistency. Every voltage and milliamp shown is computed, not scripted. It is an idealised DC model: steady-state only, no transients or AC, and the LED is a forward-threshold + series-resistance approximation, not a full SPICE Shockley diode.
Read the full lab reportBytes on a Wire
Put a sensor reading on a real wire — then corrupt one bit and watch the checksum catch it.
Every sensor in the world talks in frames of bytes. Build one live, break it with a single flipped bit, and watch the receiver refuse to be lied to.
How deep would you like to go?
show me · the plain-English storyThe sliders re-encode a real 10-byte frame live: sync byte, header, packed sensor values, and a CRC-16 checksum. Click any byte to flip one bit — a classic wire fault — and the decoder recomputes the checksum, catches the mismatch, and refuses the frame instead of handing over a wrong temperature.
Wow — One flipped bit out of 80 — a 1.25% change — is enough for the CRC-16 to reject the whole frame. On a railway platform, that refusal is a safety feature: a wrong reading is worse than none.
Try this — Slide the temperature and watch exactly which two bytes change (they're the payload). Then click one of the CRC bytes itself — the checksum can even catch damage to itself.
What's really happening · A real, from-scratch binary codec in the NovaP style: big-endian int16 temperature ×100, uint8 light and motion, and a bit-by-bit CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE over header + payload. It is a faithful small sibling of the protected NovaP wire protocol, not the protected implementation itself.
Read the full lab reportAlso coming to this floor
- The Signal BridgeOne switch, one lamp: a switch is a bit — on = 1, off = 0.