Friday, February 09, 2018

[fksvzxxv] 60 redundant connectors

A dodecahedral device interfaces with the outside world by plugging into a pentagonal socket.  All faces work with any of the 5 rotations of a face.  There are therefore a total of 60 interfaces (icosahedral symmetry), one for each fifth of a face.  Make them all redundant, because the interface is often the most fragile part of a device, so having many copies is good.

Motivation is the transfer interface of a highly reliable data storage device.

Less elegantly, it could simply have many ports (even more than 60), perhaps arranged on a grid on a face, each to which a cable may be connected, e.g., KVM.

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