Mechanical Red Panda Revives a Blast From the Past with a 3D-Printed Babbage Difference Engine

Pseudonymous maker "Mechanical Red Panda," hereafter simply "Panda," has blended modern manufacturing techniques with a classic of early computing in a project to build a 3D-printed implementation of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine.

"Imagine a world where computation began with gears and steam-powered machinery. Enter Charles Babbage, a visionary mathematician and inventor who conceptualized the world's first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine No. 2, back in the 19th century," Panda explains. "This groundbreaking device was designed to perform complex mathematical calculations, heralding the dawn of computing technology. Its intricate series of interlocking gears, cranks, and cylinders laid the foundation for modern computers."

The Difference Engine No. 0 was an automated mechanical calculator implementing the divided difference method, with the first example being produced in 1822. Funded by the British government, its creator Charles Babbage would go on to create a successor, the Difference Engine No. 1 in 1830 weighing four tons — though the project was scrapped before the device was ever finished, after Babbage became fixated on the development of a more advanced device dubbed the Analytical Engine.

Despite the failure of the Difference Engine No. 1 project and Babbage's interests shifting, a third machine — the Difference Engine No. 2 — was designed, supporting 31-digit numbers and seventh-order differences while using fewer parts than the scrapped No. 1. That design, too, would not see the light of day — but forms the basis of Panda's functional scale model.

Unlike Babbage, Panda has modern technology on their side for the building of the scale Difference Engine No. 2: 3D printing, which allows the intricate cogs and gears which made the original designs so complex to manufacture to be built quickly and iterated upon as required. The use of plastic rather than metal also serves to make the device much lighter than the original, while the precision available on modern 3D printers can make the device functional at a smaller scale.

Like Babbage's original, Panda's replica is a work-in-progress: at the time of writing the maker had successfully produced a version which uses eight figure wheels and can calculate linear functions. More information is available on Panda's Hackaday.io page, while STEP files for a two-figure-wheel test piece have been have been published to GitHub under an unspecified license.