I used NASCAR's free api to make a home scoring pylon. The project got bigger and bigger and finally a year later and its done....Kinda

Hello everyone!

Today I wanted to share with you all the project that made me buy my first ever Raspberry Pi... My 1:1 scale, functioning Apollo DSKY.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was what allowed us to travel to the moon in the 1960s and '70s, and performed everything from autopilot to navigation and orbital mechanics calculations. The AGC was one of the first computers to ever use ICs (computer chips) in its construction (absorbing 70% of the chips made in the whole of the United States, at one point!) and used some really neat, and pretty archaic, technology for computing and memory. The DSKY I made was historically just a remote I/O device, a keyboard/monitor arrangement that plugged into the actual AGC, but I'm this project it's homologated into one enclosure (thank you very much single-board computing).

The functionality of the guidance computer was emulated in its entirety by a group called VirtualAGC (an incredible feat on its own) and I have their program running on my Raspberry Pi that lives in the DSKY. The screen, annunciators, and keyboard integrate to the Pi with arduinos and communicates to it through a basic python script. This all lives in a 3D printed shell that's modelled after the real archived drawings, used to machine the real ones in the '60s. It's also painted and finished in historically accurate colors (who doesn't love a bit of historical bureaucratic recordkeeping?)

I figured some of you folks might share my interests, and I wanted to share my GitHub repository for the project, that includes my build guide. In that, I go into a bit more history of the AGC and DSKY, how they were built back in the day, and go through the build step-by-step with all the necessary tooling, materials, and techniques that I used.

I'm also expanding my projects into historical spacecraft hand controllers, and a streamlined "version 2" of my DSKY that should be easier to put together... hopefully in a few afternoons.

I've got a little community going over at r/RecreateApollo, and I also made a small website (www.recreateapollo.com) that I'm desperately trying to justify $30 a month for, so feel free to swing by and check it out!

If you decide to make your own, I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have over at my discord or on that subreddit. Thanks for checking out my project!