A Rube Goldberg machine is a cascading device which performs a series of sequential operations triggered by the preceding operation in a indirect chain reaction to perform a final simple task (much like preceding sentence).
This electronic version starts with a voltage booster which triggers a relay contained in a simple LC oscillator. The capacitor in the oscillator is charged, the relay then releases which starts the oscillator. This is connected to a counter, which upon counting down to zero sends a bit to a 4 bit serial shift register. The bit is shifted to trigger an op amp which powers a 555 to light an LED.
A classic example of a Rube Goldberg device is the game ‘Mousetrap’, at least for those of you who remember an analog existence.
Simply close the switch to start.
