Apollo Command Uplink Mystery Box
Added 2021-09-07 18:08:24 +0000 UTCMarcel has given us another mystery box to add up to our Apollo USB link setup. This one appears to have to do with checking the uplink commands functionality. We could not find any documentation on it.
It has a whole bunch of cards plugged in.
The top numbered holes are probing checkpoints.
The cards are made with modules that resemble relays. But they are not relays, they are simple logic modules made with discrete components, implementing simple gates or flip-flops.
Some of them are analog:
Ken has been able slowly reverse engineer them, you can follow his progress on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1434947848605290497
It's missing a whole bunch of stuff, including all the power supplies and a card, but we were able to power it back up with judicious application of +28V, +6V and -6V. The display on the top uses edge illuminated plastic diffusers, it's quite nice, albeit super power hungry. Here we powered up just one digit with 28V. Which shows a 9, which should actually never happen in reality, because the display is in octal.
Our current hypothesis is that it generates a command from a paper tape drive in the front. It needs to be hooked up to quite a bit of uplink and downlink equipment to send it and check that it has been correctly received.
Marc
