The TMD-1 is a Turing machine demonstrator

According to Michael Gardi, although you can find numerous stunning Turing machine implementations on the Internet, their complexity tends to detract from the simplicity of what a Turing machine actually does. In order to easily show how they work, he decided to create a demonstrator with the actual calculations handled by an Arduino Mega.

The console, dubbed TMD-1, displays a “tape” state on the top of the device using eight servo-controlled flip tiles that write 1s or 0s, while a series of lighted arrows indicate the program’s position. On the bottom surface, users can program instructions with magnetic tiles, and read the current machine state via LEDs.

It’s a slick design — as seen in the short demo clip below — and more details on the build can be found in Gardi’s tutorial.