Computer Laboratory

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Turing Machines

Written by Jeffrey Lee.

"Turing Machine on a Pi" is a project which will guide anyone who wishes to through how to build simple electronic circuits using a Raspberry Pi, with the ultimate goal of building a Turing machine! No prior background in hardware is required.

There are also some exercises involving operating the Turing machine, providing insight into the logic behind how computers perform simple operations.

The tutorial will consist of the following sections:

  1. How a Turing machine works:
    Introduction to what a Turing machine does.
  2. Basic hardware:
    Build simple circuits with LEDs, switches, bicoloured LEDs and I2C I/O expanders interfaced with the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi.
  3. Turing machine hardware:
    Step-by-step tutorial on building the Turing machine on a solderless breadboard and how to operate it.
  4. Turing Machine programs:
    Binary Counter.
    Unary Subtraction.
    3-State Busybeaver.
    4-State Busybeaver.
    Palindrome Detector.