Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer | Hacker News Reader

Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer

raspberrypi.com

60 pointsBrajeshwar9 comments

I'm always amazed at how you could fly to the Moon with such basic controls. The Apollo capsule controls compared to the Dragon controls really feels like the difference between a Wright Flyer and a modern glass cockpit airplane.

It is. At the same time I am at least as impressed with the antique people that went all over the globe in leaky (and by modern standards tiny) buckets.

They all share the same drive to discover the unknown and it still saddens me that we stopped at the moon (though I understand how it happened). We could have been all over the solar system by now, the cost would be phenomenal and it would still be extremely dangerous but definitely a possibility if mankind would pull in the same direction for a while. I suspect we were/are at a local maximum of sorts that precludes that from happening and the attractor is strong enough that we may never be able to escape from it.

That's a fantastic job, both in terms of authentic looks (with some license for materials availability) as well as the very neat job on the guts (though the powerbank looks a bit like an afterthought).

I just put together a robot based on the Pi and it mindblowing how powerful these little things are. Initially I had it all running on a 'big' Raspberry Pi 5 but with a little bit of action by mr. Shoehorn it works just as well on the Pi Zero 2! A full Unix computer for $20 with GPIO, PWM, serial, i2c, USB, Camera and wifi.

Reminded me of one of my favorite Applied Science videos where he makes an electroluminescent DSKY display: https://youtu.be/Z2o_Sp2-aBo

It was a lot of up-front work, and BIG DESIGN UP FRONT allowed the thing to succeed in production.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vV1hIcqcMQ3VEIFeb8Bg6zwE...

Fascinating. Is there a read somewhere on the control and thruster algorithms?

I have no doubt a pi can run them now

Even a modern MCU is vastly more powerful than the OG Apollo computer, why use Full Blow SBC ?

Would a modern tiny MCU survive the space conditions, such as high energy radiation blasting its transistors? I seriously doubt it. The original Apollo computer was so big that nothing could break it.

I don't understand the question. Are you saying RP gonna launch this replication to space ?

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