The author has a lot more info here:
https://medium.com/@bigattichouse/an-experimental-open-sourc...
Quite cool! This reminds me of other homemade memristor endeavours that have been presented:
Whenever I hear about memristors, I think back on this guy I came across online, whose company blog publishes stuff like this: https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/
He patented a memristor design, and seemingly has some wild ideas stemming from his work with them.
> My statement stems from our work with AHaH Computing. When two energy-dissipating pathways compete for conduction resources, a Knowm synapse (aka kT-Bit) will emerge and it can be shown that the pair maximizes power dissipation while driving Hebbian or Anti-Hebbian learning. We see this building block for self-organized structures throughout Nature, for example in arteries, veins, lungs, neurons, leaves, branches, roots, lightning, rivers and mycelium networks of fungus. > > We observe that in all cases there is a particle that flows through competitive energy dissipating assemblies. The particle is either directly a carrier of free energy dissipation or else it appears to gate access, like a key to a lock, to free energy dissipation of the units in the collective. Some examples of these particles include water and sugars in plants, ATP in cells, blood in bodies, neurotrophins in neurons, and money in economies. In the cases of whirlpools, hurricanes, tornadoes and convection currents we note that although the final structure does not appear to be built of competitive structures, it is the result of a competitive process with one winner; namely, the spin or rotation. In other words, a hurricane is a ācollapsed kT-Bitā.
I wonder how small this could get. If it could be shrunk to fit in, say, a 0603, you could fit a million of these on a decently-small pcb.
And case of those could have a billion memristors.
How is this not simply an electrolytic capacitor operating near its breakdown voltage?
I have experimented a lot with memories, for now the most interesting path is to use just LEDs as 1 bit of dynamic memory.
1. Cover the LED so it cannot be hit by light 2. Charge it in reverse bias to write a 1 or do nothing to write a 0
inverting the polarity and reading the + you detect a voltage for up to 3-5 seconds depending on the diode if a 1 was written in earlier :)
It's the memristor part that should have been in quotes in the title.
I fail to grasp the magnitude of this.
Is this the first feasible memristor?
Can someone update the URL to the "Old" Reddit which loads much faster and has more information density: https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/kqbgnn/i_belie... ?
Forrest M. Mims III, the author of those little electronic design books that Radio Shack sold, actually invented a new application for LEDs, bidirectional data transfer.
He ended up suing Bell Labs and winning a settlement:
https://www.gunn-lee.com/Cases/
He also wrote the Altair 8800 user manual.
Thanks - much more valuable than someone bitching about using the new reddit vs the old one.
This and all the examples linked elsewhere in the thread seem to be electrochemical batteries where the anode or cathode are used as a resistor in another circuit. A current is applied and a metal oxidizes. Itās pretty well known that as a metal oxidizes, itās resistive properties will change.
As most people know batteries have a limited number of cycles. Every reaction cycle adds some entropy/side reactions, and eventually it will become irreversible. Magnetic storage reorients a crystal or metal, which is more repeatable than a chemical reaction. Our neurons have similar systems to ācleanā themselves so they can reset.
I imagine finding a viable memresistor is more about its ability to cycle.