All connections between the spacecraft and the Apollo Guidance Computer take place through the main connector (A51). This has 360 pins, six rows high and 60 columns wide. The DSKY itself connects through A51, which made this a priority to implement.
As I detailed in an earlier post, this is a labor intensive cleaning process but finally we had all of them ready for a male connector to be inserted. We had designed an aluminum plate to hold the 360 Malco mini-wasp pins and to position a printed circuit board we designed atop it. The pins were soldered to the PCB and the far end held eight HD50 connectors (familiar to those who used these as SCSI cables).
Connector attached to AGC carrying 360 signals out for our access |
Accelerometer simulator developed
Marc designed an Arduino based module that would simulate the accelerometers of the LM spacecraft. These Pendulous Integrating Pulse Accelerometers (PIPAs) swing a small pendulum back and forth kicked by three pulses in one direction followed by three in the other. When no external acceleration exists, the PIPA outputs a steady stream of three positive then three negative pulses.
PIPA simulator plugged into patch panel |
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