Apollo On Board Computer Emulator 166
frankk74 writes "For those of you interested in Historical Computing and the Apollo manned spaceflights Ron Burkey has created a open source emulation of the Apollo Guidance Computer called vAGC. I use it as my desktop clock of choice. Note it only keeps mission time so after 24 hours you have reset the time :-). P.S. Another cool Apollo toy free and payware can be found here."
The coolest project I've ever seen (Score:3, Insightful)
12-bit Instruction set (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:12-bit Instruction set (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:very simple processor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Insightful)
Disaster waiting to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to figure out how much is left in a liquid oxygen tank in outer space is not an easy task. If you wanted to know that answer here on earth you would weigh the tank - which obviously won't work in free fall.
The idea they came up with was to have a sensor in the tank that could measure the level by resistive means. In order to have a 'level' to measure they had to create an artificial gravity inside the tank by swirling the contents with an internal electric motor and a blade. In the movie "Apollo 13" one of the astronauts talks about "stirring the O2 tank", that is what he is talking about.
Consider what this all means: you have a tank full of liquid Oxygen, you have several pounds of highly combustible aluminum and graphite parts which are soaked in liquid Oxygen, and you have a DC motor with brushes sparking up a storm inside the tank. Another name for such a combination is a "bomb".
NASA's - management driven - engineering has long been full of "Whir click, whir click - OK, Russian Roulette is flight certified as safe" thinking. Nobody does a "how could this all go wrong" analysis.
Re:Disaster waiting to happen (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Disaster waiting to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
Measuring how long the stirrer takes to come up to speed tells you the mass of what you are accelerating.
Re:Disaster waiting to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
Or another alternative...sonar...sound reflected off the contents of the tank.
wbs.
Re:very simple processor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:very simple processor (Score:5, Insightful)
It is of course completely irrelevant that their pentium is a heap of crap, as you imply. These are the kind of idiots that don't believe that you could have a 3d game on a 20 year old 8bit micro - showing them Elite blows their minds.
They think that because a computer is slow it's worthless. Well, that's what Microsoft and Intel keep telling us so it must be true. Also their 3d shooter is damn slow. That's gotta be proof.
Conversely those of us with brains, real software development knowledge, and an appreciation of physics realise that you hardly need any computing power at all for an Apollo space craft. Indeed it's arguable that the computer they did have was overkill - a computer-less solution could have been engineered.
Re:very simple processor (Score:3, Insightful)