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The Last Black Box Course

A course consisting of 28 black boxes that you open in sequence using the materials contained in the "Last Black Box" kit

Course Layout

Order your "Last Black Box" now!

NB3

You will be building a brain for your robot. The robot's physical layout mimics the basic anatomy of a (vertebrate) brain. As you progress through the course, your robot will evolve into an increasingly sophisticated machine. The goal is to create an "intelligent" machine without using any black boxes. We thus call this robot the No-Black-Box-Brain or NBBB or NB3.

NB3 outline

Repository

The course is based on the documentation and code in this repo (LBB). Many of the course exercises assume that you have "cloned" this repo to your Host computer. In much of the example code, there is an additional assumption that the LBB repo is in a folder called "NoBlackBoxes" in your home/user directory. You can setup everything (on Linux...and your NB3) with the following commands.

# ...from your "home" directory
mkdir NoBlackBoxes  # Create NoBlackBoxes directory
cd NoBlackBoxes     # Change to NoBlackBoxes directory

# Clone LBB repo (only the most recent commit)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NoBlackBoxes/LastBlackBox

Versions

There are shorter versions of this course that cover a specific subset of the "black boxes" and focus on specific themes.

  • Bootcamp: A one-week intensive introduction to the essentials of modern technology and neuroscience.

  • Build a Brain: Designed for secondary school age students, this hands-on course shows you how recent advances in science and technology have made it possible for humans to create intelligent machines...by building you own.

  • Own Phone: -Under Development- Get your "smartphone license"! Demonstrate to your parents/friends that you can take control of your digital tools...before they take control you.

Black Boxes

  1. Atoms

    • Technology: Introduction to atoms, sub-atomic particles, and forces.
    • Neuroscience: From physics to chemistry to biology to brains.

    Tasks: Draw your favorite atoms and molecules.

  2. Electrons

    • Technology: Intro to basic electronics: voltage, current, resistance, batteries, Ohm's Law, voltage dividers, and power (dissipation).
    • Neuroscience: Neurons (resting potential), passive properties.

    Tasks: Measure voltage/current/resistance. Build a voltage divider. Turn on a light bulb.

  3. Magnets

    • Technology: Intro to magnetism
    • Neuroscience: Why not?

    Tasks: Build a speaker...coil an electromagnet

  4. Light

    • Technology: Intro to EM radiation and spectrum
    • Neuroscience: Why not?

    Tasks: Lightbulbs and antennas

  5. Sensors

    • Technology: Intro to transduction of heat, light, pressure, and sound.
    • Neuroscience: Intro to photoreceptors, hair cells, and mechanosensors.

    Tasks: Build a light, heat, pressure sensor using a photoresitor, thermistor, piezo

  6. Motors

    • Technology: Intro to electromagnetism and piezos
    • Neuroscience: Muscles and motor neruons (chemical synapses?)

    Tasks: Wind a coil, spin a motor, make a sound, build a theremin(?)

  7. Transistors

    • Technology: Intro to tubes and transistors
    • Neuroscience: Action potentials and axons and synapses (or later...with decisions?)

    Tasks: Switch on a motor with your sensor, better theremin?

  8. Amplifiers

    • Technology: Intro op amps
    • Neuroscience: Multiplicative NMJ, gain
      • Exercises**: Move a motor with your sensor, better theremin?

  9. Circuits

    • Technology: Intro to integrated circults; how are they made and what are they good for.
    • Neuroscience: Simple sensorimotor behaviour

    Tasks: Build a Braitenberg vehicle

  10. Power

    • Technology: Voltage regulators
    • Neuroscience: Efficiency and homeostasis

    Tasks: Install NB3_power

  11. Data

    • Technology: Getting from analog to digital (0 and 1s is all you need), ADCs and DACs
    • Neuroscience: Neural code? (rate v timing?)

    Tasks: Comparator...Build a simple ADC?

  12. Logic

    • Technology: digital logic and the basis of computation
    • Neuroscience: Simple neural circuits: E and I

    Tasks: Build an adder

  13. Memory

    • Technology: flip/flop, flash, storage
    • Neuroscience: Synapses, LTP, and NMDA channels

    Tasks: Sample hold circuit? (clapper?) Build a D-Latch

  14. FPGAs

    • Technology: Programmble logic devices, HDL (verilog)
    • Neuroscience: simple, adaptable circuits for computation

    Tasks: Adder in FPGA...ALU...cpu

  15. Computers

    • Technology: ALU, microcontrollers and progamming I
    • Neuroscience: basic brains (brain computer anlogy debate)

    Tasks: Arduino basics, blinky in ASM and C

  16. Control

    • Technology: Negative feedback and servos, H-bridge, PID
    • Neuroscience: Motor control

    Tasks: Write direction, speed (and position?) controller

  17. Robotics

    • Technology: Smarter robots
    • Neuroscience: Smarter bot

    Tasks: Ardunio based robot (PWM motors? various sensors?): Task: ?

  18. Systems

    • Technology: Operating systems and programming II
    • Neuroscience: Brain systems (sense, perceive, memory, learning, )

    Tasks: Booting and connecting

  19. Linux

    • Technology: Linux and command lines
    • Neuroscience: Should the interfaces to your brain be "open"?

    Tasks: Linux-life

  20. Python

    • Technology: Programming in Python, installing packages, and virtual environments
    • Neuroscience: How to think like a programmer?

    Tasks: Talk to your hindbrain

  21. Networks

    • Technology: Internet protocols and WiFi
    • Neuroscience: Physical layer and neural protocols

    Tasks: SSH and connect to bot via ESP or NRF

  22. Websites

    • Technology: HTML, CSS
    • Neuroscience: ??

    Tasks: Build a nice looking website

  23. Servers

    • Technology: HTTP requests and responses
    • Neuroscience: ??

    Tasks: Host your nice looking website

  24. Security

    • Technology: Encryption
    • Neuroscience: ??

    Tasks: Mine a bitcoin?

  25. Audio

    • Technology: From mics to "understanding" sound
    • Neuroscience: Extracting information from hair cells, sound localization

    Tasks: Build a sound localizer (dealing with 1D data)

  26. Vision

    • Technology: From cameras to "vision"
    • Neuroscience: Extracting information from photoreceptors (through V1 and beyond)

    Tasks: Build a colored blob detector

  27. Learning

    • Technology: Reinforcement learning and clicker training
    • Neuroscience: RL in brains

    Tasks: Clicker train yourself and your robot

  28. Intelligence

    • Technology: Neural Networks and modern "AI", NPUs, LLMs
    • Neuroscience: From fish to humans, evolution of biological intelligence

    Tasks: NPU and tensorflow...mysteries...

License

Creative Commons License
The entire LastBlackBox repository and website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.