Apollo-era PCB Reverse Engineering To KiCad

Earlier this year [Skyhawkson] got ahold of an Apollo-era printed circuit board which he believes was used in a NASA test stand. He took high quality photos of both sides of the board and superimposed them atop each other. After digging into a few obsolete parts from the 1960s, he was able to trace out the connections. I ran across the project just after making schematics for the Supercon badge and petal matrix. Being on a roll, I decided to take [Skyhawkson]’s work as a starting point and create KiCad schematics. Hopefully we can figure out what this circuit board does along the way.

The board is pretty simple:

  • approximately 6.5 x 4.5 inches
  • 22 circuit edge connector 0.156 in pitch
  • 31 ea two-terminal parts ( resistors, diodes )
  • 3 ea trimmer potentiometers
  • 7 ea transistors
  • parts arranged in 4 columns

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Supercon 2023: Restoring The Apollo Guidance Computer

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!

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Voyager 1 Fault Forces Switch To S-Band

We hate to admit it, but whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios. One of these days, we’ll be forced to write obituaries for the plucky interstellar travelers, but today is not that day, even with news of yet another issue aboard Voyager 1 that threatens its ability to communicate with Earth.

According to NASA, the current problem began on October 16 when controllers sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. Voyager 1, nearly a light-day distant from Earth, failed to respond as expected 46 hours later. After some searching, controllers picked up the spacecraft’s X-band downlink signal but at a much lower power than expected. This indicated that the spacecraft had gone into fault protection mode, likely in response to the command to turn on the heater. A day later, Voyager 1 stopped communicating altogether, suggesting that further fault protection trips disabled the powerful X-band transmitter and switched to the lower-powered S-band downlink.

This was potentially mission-ending; the S-band downlink had last been used in 1981 when the probe was still well within the confines of the solar system, and the fear was that the Deep Space Network would not be able to find the weak signal. But find it they did, and on October 22 they sent a command to confirm S-band communications. At this point, controllers can still receive engineering data and command the craft, but it remains to be seen what can be done to restore full communications. They haven’t tried to turn the X-band transmitter back on yet, wisely preferring to further evaluate what caused the fault protection error that kicked this whole thing off before committing to a step like that.

Following Voyager news these days feels a little morbid, like a death watch on an aging celebrity. Here’s hoping that this story turns out to have a happy ending and that we can push the inevitable off for another few years. While we wait, if you want to know a little more about the Voyager comms system, we’ve got a deep dive that should get you going.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

Supercon 2023: Receiving Microwave Signals From Deep-Space Probes

Here’s the thing about radio signals. There is wild and interesting stuff just getting beamed around all over the place. Phrased another way, there are beautiful signals everywhere for those with ears to listen. We go about our lives oblivious to most of them, but some dedicate their time to teasing out and capturing these transmissions.

David Prutchi is one such person. He’s a ham radio enthusiast that dabbles in receiving microwave signals sent from probes in deep space. What’s even better is that he came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about how it’s done!

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Hackaday Links: September 29, 2024

There was movement in the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” last week, with the bill advancing out of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and heading to a full floor vote. For those not playing along at home, auto manufacturers have been making moves toward deleting AM radios from cars because they’re too sensitive to all the RF interference generated by modern vehicles. The trouble with that is that the government has spent a lot of effort on making AM broadcasters the centerpiece of a robust and survivable emergency communications system that reaches 90% of the US population.

The bill would require cars and trucks manufactured or sold in the US to be equipped to receive AM broadcasts without further fees or subscriptions, and seems to enjoy bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Critics of the bill will likely point out that while the AM broadcast system is a fantastic resource for emergency communications, if nobody is listening to it when an event happens, what’s the point? That’s fair, but short-sighted; emergency communications isn’t just about warning people that something is going to happen, but coordinating the response after the fact. We imagine Hurricane Helene’s path of devastation from Florida to Pennsylvania this week and the subsequent emergency response might bring that fact into focus a bit.

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Watch NASA’s Solar Sail Reflect Brightly In The Night Sky

NASA’s ACS3 (Advanced Composite Solar Sail System) is currently fully deployed in low Earth orbit, and stargazers can spot it if they know what to look for. It’s actually one of the brightest things in the night sky. When the conditions are right, anyway.

ACS3’s sail is as thin as it is big.

What conditions are those? Orientation, mostly. ACS3 is currently tumbling across the sky while NASA takes measurements about how it acts and moves. Once that’s done, the spacecraft will be stabilized. For now, it means that visibility depends on the ACS’s orientation relative to someone on the ground. At it’s brightest, it appears as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

ACS3 is part of NASA’s analysis and testing of solar sail technology for use in future missions. Solar sails represent a way of using reflected photons (from sunlight, but also possibly from a giant laser) for propulsion.

This perhaps doesn’t have much in the way of raw energy compared to traditional thrusters, but offers low cost and high efficiency (not to mention considerably lower complexity and weight) compared to propellant-based solutions. That makes it very worth investigating. Solar sail technology aims to send a probe to Alpha Centauri within the next twenty years.

Want to try to spot ACS3 with your own eyes? There’s a NASA app that can alert you to sighting opportunities in your local time and region, and even guide you toward the right region of the sky to look. Check it out!

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Hackaday Links: September 8, 2024

OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Shocking, we know, but that certainly seems to be what an outfit called Cox Media Group (CMG) does with its “Active Listening” software, according to a leaked slide deck that was used to pitch potential investors. The gist is that the software uses a smartphone’s microphone to listen to conversations and pick out keywords that it feeds to its partners, namely Google, Facebook, and Amazon so that they can target you with directed advertisements. Ever have an IRL conversation about something totally random only to start seeing references to that subject pop up where they never did before? We sure have, and while “relationship mining” seemed like a more parsimonious explanation back in 2017, the state of tech makes eavesdropping far more plausible today. Then there’s the whole thing of basically being caught red-handed. The Big Three all huffed and puffed about how they were shocked, SHOCKED to learn that this was going on, with reactions ranging from outright denial of ever partnering with CMG to quietly severing their relationship with the company. So much for years of gaslighting on this.

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