Humans first visited the Moon in 1969. The last time we went was 1972, over 50 years ago. Back then, astronauts in the Apollo program made their journeys in spacecraft that relied on remarkably basic electronics that are totally unsophisticated compared to what you might find in an expensive blender or fridge these days. Core among them was the Apollo Guidance Computer, charged with keeping the craft on target as it travelled to its destination and back again.
Marc Verdiell, also known as CuriousMarc, is a bit of a dab hand at restoring old vintage electronics. Thus, when it came time to restore one of these rare and storied guidance computers, he was ready and willing to take on the task. Even better, he came to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to tell us how it all went down!
One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of preserving Apollo Program software, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. We’ve talked about [Marc]’s previous efforts to get real Apollo hardware working again, and one of the by-products of this effort was recovering the contents of the read-only core rope memory modules that were part of that hardware.
The time finally came to hand the now-working Apollo guidance computer back to its owner, which left the team without any hardware to read core rope modules. But the archive of software from the program was still incomplete, and there were more modules to try to recover. So, the wizardly [Mike Stewart] just decided to roll up his sleeves and build his own reader. Which didn’t actually work as expected the first time.
And this leads us into one of [Marc]’s elevator music explainers, where he gives a beautiful rundown on how core rope works. And if you are thinking of core memory based on ferrite cores, get ready for a brain stretch, as core rope is quite a bit different, and is even more complicated to read. Which brings us to the bug in [Mike]’s reader, which is actually a bug in the block II design of the core rope modules.
Reading a byte off the module requires setting multiple inhibit wires to select an individual core. An innovation in block II allowed those inhibit wires to run at half current, but it turns out that didn’t actually work as intended, and partially selected multiple cores on the other half of the module. And [Mike] forget to re-implement that bug — the reader needs to literally be bug-for-bug compatible. A quick recompile of the FPGA code makes everything work again. And the conservation effort can continue. Stay tuned for more in the Apollo story!
It’s not often that a single photo can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about a project, but the spectrum analyzer screenshot nearby is the perfect summary of this over-the-top low-distortion audio oscillator build. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a ton of interesting stuff going on with this one, so buckle up.
One spike at the fundamental and not much more.
The project is by [Basin Street Design], who doesn’t really offer much by way of inspiration for this undertaking, nor a discussion on what this will be used for. But the design goals are pretty clear: build an oscillator with as little distortion as possible across the audio frequency range.
The basic circuit is the well-known Wien bridge oscillator where the R-C pairs are switched in and out of the feedback loop to achieve frequency range control. This was accomplished with rotary switches rebuilt from their original configuration in a Heathkit IG-18 sine/square wave generator, a defunct instrument that was gutted and used as an enclosure for this build. There are a lot of other treats here, too, like the automatic gain control (AGC) that uses a homebrew voltage-controlled resistor made from an incandescent lamp and a cadmium sulfide photoresistor glued inside a piece of brake line, and an output attenuator made from discrete resistors that drops the output in 10 dB steps while maintaining an overall 75-Ohm impedance.
But at the end of the day, it all comes down to that single spike on the spectrum analyzer, with no apparent harmonics. To make sure there wasn’t something hiding down in the noise, [Basin Street] added a notch filter to lower the fundamental by 60 dB, allowing the spectrum analyzer sensitivity to be cranked way up. Harmonics were visible, but so far down into the noise — as low as -115 dBc — that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
There’s a lot more detail in this one, so dive in and enjoy. If you want another take on Wien bridge circuits, check out this recent LM386-based oscillator. Just don’t expect such low distortion with that one.
Once ubiquitous, the incandescent light bulb has become something of a lucerna non grata lately. Banned from home lighting, long gone from flashlights, and laughed out of existence by automotive engineers, you have to go a long way these days to find something that still uses a tungsten filament.
Strangely enough, this lamp-stabilized LM386 Wien bridge oscillator is one place where an incandescent bulb makes an appearance. The Wien bridge itself goes back to the 1890s when it was developed for impedance measurements, and its use in the feedback circuits of vacuum tube oscillators dates back to the 1930s. The incandescent bulb is used in the negative feedback path as an automatic gain control; the tungsten filament’s initial low resistance makes for high gain to kick off oscillation, after which it heats up and lowers the resistance to stabilize the oscillation.
For [Grug Huler], this was one of those “just for funsies” projects stemming from a data sheet example circuit showing a bulb-stabilized LM386 audio oscillator. He actually found it difficult to source the specified lamp — there’s that anti-tungsten bias again — but still managed to cobble together a working audio oscillator. The first pass actually came in pretty close to spec — 1.18 kHz compared to the predicted 1.07 kHz — and the scope showed a very nice-looking sine wave. We were honestly a bit surprised that the FFT analysis showed as many harmonics as it did, but all things considered, the oscillator performed pretty well, especially after a little more tweaking. And no, the light bulb never actually lights up.
Thanks to [Grug] for going down this particular rabbit hole and sharing what he learned. We love builds like this that unearth seemingly obsolete circuits and bring them back to life with modern components. OK, calling the LM386 a modern component might be stretching things a bit, but it is [Elliot]’s favorite chip for a reason.
Seems like all the cool kids are rewriting legacy C programs in Rust these days, so we suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to combine the memory-safe language with some of the most historically significant software ever written by way of a new Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) emulator. Written by [Felipe], the Apache/MIT licensed emulator can run either ROM files made from the computer’s original rope core memory, or your own code written in AGC4 assembly language.
It’s worth noting that the emulator, called ragc, needs a bit of help before it can deliver that authentic Moon landing experience. Specifically, the code only emulates the AGC itself and stops short of recreating the iconic display and keyboard (DSKY) module. To interact with the programs running on the virtual AGC you’ll need to also install yaDSKY2, an open source project that graphically recreates the panel Apollo astronauts actually used to enter commands and get data from the computer.
Of course, the next step would be to hack in support for talking to one of the physical recreations of the DSKY that have graced these pages over the years. Given the limitations of the AGC, we’d stop short of calling such an arrangement useful, but it would certainly make for a great conversation starter at the hackerspace.
We love seeing old technology brought back to life, especially when it’s done in the context of how the device was originally intended to be used. And double points when it’s space gear, like what [Curious Marc] and his usual merry band of cohorts did when they managed to light up a couple of real Apollo DSKY displays.
The “Display and Keyboard” formed the human interface to the Apollo Guidance Computer, the purpose-built machine that allowed Apollo missions to fly to the Moon, land safely, and return to Earth. Complete DSKYs are hard to come by, but a lucky collector named [Marcel] was able to score a pair of the electroluminescent panels, one a prototype and one a flight-qualified spare. He turned them over to AGC guru [Carl Claunch], who worked out all the details of getting the display working again — a non-trivial task with a device that needs 250 volts at 800 Hertz.
The first third of the video below mostly concerns the backstory of the DSKY displays and the historical aspects of the artifacts; skip to around the 12:30 mark to get into the technical details, including the surprising use of relays to drive the segments of the display. It makes sense once you realize that mid-60s transistors weren’t up to the task, and it must have made the Apollo spacecraft a wonderfully clicky place. We were also intrigued by the clever way the total relay count was kept to a minimum, by realizing that not every combination of segments was valid for each seven-segment display.
Tell the world that something is in short supply, and you can bet that people will start reacting to that news in the ways that make the most sense to them — remember the toilet paper shortage? It’s the same with the ongoing semiconductor pinch, except that since the item in short supply is (arguably) more valuable than toilet paper, the behavior and the risks people are willing to take around it are even more extreme. Sure, we’ve seen chip hoarding, and a marked rise in counterfeit chips. But we’d imagine that this is the first time we’ve seen chip smuggling quite like this. The smuggler was caught at the Hong Kong-Macao border with 256 Core i7 and i9 processors, valued at about $123,000, strapped to his legs and chest. It reminds us more of “Midnight Express”-style heroin smuggling, although we have to say we love the fact that this guy chose a power of 2 when strapping these babies on.
Speaking of big money, let’s say you’ve pulled off a few chip heists without getting caught, and have retired from the smuggling business. What is one to do with the ill-gotten gains? Apparently, there’s a big boom in artifacts from the early days of console gaming, so you might want to start spreading some money around there. But you’d better prepare to smuggle a lot of chips: last week, an unopened Legend of Zelda cartridge for the NES sold for $870,000 at auction. Not to be outdone, two days later someone actually paid $1.56 million for a Super Mario 64 cartridge, this time apparently still in the tamperproof container that displayed it on a shelf somewhere in 1996. Nostalgia can be an expensive drug.
And it’s not just video games that are commanding high prices these days. If you’ve got a spare quarter million or so, why not bid on this real Apollo Guidance Computer and DSKY? The AGC is a non-flown machine that was installed in LTA-8, the “lunar test article” version of the Landing Module (LM) that was used for vacuum testing. If the photos in the auction listing seem familiar, it’s with good reason: this is the same AGC that was restored to operating condition by Carl Claunch, Mike Stewart, Ken Shiriff, and Marc Verdiell. Sotheby’s estimates the value at $200,000 to $300,000; in a world of billionaire megalomaniacs with dreams of space empires, we wouldn’t be surprised if a working AGC went for much, much more than that.
Meanwhile, current day space exploration is going swimmingly. Just this week NASA got the Hubble Space Telescope back online, which is great news for astronomers. And on Mars, the Ingenuity helicopter just keeps on delivering during its “operations demonstration” mission. Originally just supposed to be a technology demonstration, Ingenuity has proven to be a useful companion to the Perseverance rover, scouting out locations of interest to explore or areas of hazard to avoid. On the helicopter’s recent ninth flight, it scouted a dune field for the team, providing photographs that showed the area would be too dangerous for the rover to cross. The rover’s on-board navigation system isn’t great at seeing sand dunes, so Ingenuity’s images are a real boon to mission planners, not to mention geologists and astrobiologists, who are seeing promising areas of the ancient lakebed to explore.
And finally, most of us know all too well how audio feedback works, and all the occasions to avoid it. But what about video feedback? What happens when you point a camera that a screen displaying the image from the camera? Fractals are what happens, or at least something that looks a lot like fractals. Code Parade has been playing with what he calls “analog fractals”, which are generated just by video feedback and not by computational means. While he’d prefer to do this old school with analog video equipment, it easy enough to replicate on a computer; he even has a web page that lets you arrange a series of virtual monitors on your screen. Point a webcam at the screen, and you’re off on a fractal journey that constantly changes and shifts. Give it a try.
