Here is a review:
Podcasting since 2005! Listen to Latest SolderSmoke
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Sci-Fi Series with an Apollo-era Vibe
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Other Workshops: Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moons: The Making of JUICE: The Full Movie
I wonder how the procedures we see in this film compare to the famed spacecraft-building procedures of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. But just remember: When it came time to launch the Webb Space Telescope, NASA opted to launch from the ESA facility in French Guiana. Their Ariane rocket apparently had a better success rate than ours. But it did seem to me that they did discover problems with some of the instruments in the thermal phase of the "shake and bake" but then corrected them without re-running the thermal tests. Was that a violation of test principles?
Watching this movie makes me really want to take out my small telescope and aim it at Jupiter (which is now high in our evening sky).
We see a lot of "soul" built into this new machine: the inclusion in the spacecraft of a copy of pages from Galileo's Starry Messenger and the names of those involved in the project, and the selection of the faring logo from a children's contest, for example. Yaryna, the young Ukrainian artist who drew the logo at age 8, even mentions "soul" in her remarks.
Godspeed, JUICE!
Monday, November 27, 2023
Video on Discovery and Restoration of the Apollo Guidance Computer
Sunday, October 29, 2023
Apollo Core Rope Memory -- CuriousMarc Takes it on (video)
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Sunburst and Luminary: Apollo "Rope" Memory, and other items of interest
Wow. That is the method that they stored computer memory for the moon missions. When they were satisfied with a program they would say it was time to "put it on the rope."
Here's an article on the women who built the rope memory (and the integrated circuits used in Apollo). This reminded me of the women's collective in Hyderabad that "wove" the ferrite core transformers for Farhan's BITX rigs:
Here is a Wikipedia article on core rope ROM memory with some great illustrations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory
-- Not long before the fatal Apollo 1 fire, an MIT colleague of Don Eyles had a drink with Astronaut Gus Grissom. Grissom unloaded about the poor state of the spacecraft, saying that, "What we have here is a Heathkit." Grissom died in the fire.
-- Eyles mentions the use of 6L6 tubes in analog audio amplifiers.
-- MIT's Doc Draper used a Minox camera.
-- When the Apollo 11 astronauts came back and were living for two weeks in an isolation chamber, NASA had bulldozers on standby to bury the whole thing ("astronauts, staff and all") in case some dangerous moon bug was detected. (Is that true?)
-- At one point soon before an important missile test, engineers realized that they needed an isolation transformer. They did not have enough time to order one. So they took an isolation transformer out of one of their soldering stations and used it in the missile. It worked. Sometimes you just use what you have on hand.
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Sunburst and Luminary -- A Poem about Transistors and ICs
Monday, October 2, 2023
"Sunburst and Luminary" author Don Eyles was a Ham, a Hacker, and a user of Plywood who Understood Juju
-- As a kid, Eyles took a summertime shop class with W4LRO. Eyles himself went on to get his ham license -- he was K4ZHF and was active for a while on the 40 meter and 6 meter bands.
-- He writes of how the Apollo software acquired more "juju as labor and logic were poured into them." Juju.
-- He describes the electronics lab in the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory: "If you had a private project you could sometimes get some simple milling done for a smile, and you could scrounge the odd resistor or capacitor... On the second floor there was a small "hackers shop" with a drill press, metal shear, a bending brake, and a few hand tools which was open to anyone, including software engineers. That was the first use of the term "hack" in a technical context, that I can recall hearing. I took the term as referring to the sometimes messy process by which perforations of suitable sizes were made in the aluminum boxes, or chassis, that were used for constructing electronic devices." Indeed. We hack.
-- After describing the first integrated circuits, Eyles looks back at high school and notes that he and a friend, "after learning about truth tables, James Chambers and I had experimented with similar devices composed of relays mounted on a piece of plywood." Plywood.
More to follow on this book.
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Sunburst and Luminary -- An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles (video)
Saturday, August 19, 2023
More Ancient Technology Keeping Space Missions Alive
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230815-the-ancient-tech-keeping-space-missions-alive
Three cheers for software. Really.
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Voyager, Canopus, JPL, and 74xx Logic Chips from the early 1970s
"So somewhere out there in interstellar space beyond the boundary of the Solar System is a card frame full of 74 logic that’s been quietly keeping an eye on a star since the early 1970s, and the engineers from those far-off days at JPL are about to save the bacon of the current generation at NASA with their work. We hope that there are some old guys in Pasadena right now with a spring in their step."
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Australia and Apollo 11 -- Honeysuckle Creek
Saturday, May 13, 2023
Jam on Radar Antenna of Jupiter-bound Spacecraft FIXED! Antenna deployed!
Great news. This stuck antenna was getting me down. Three cheers for the ESA folks who fixed it from afar.
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-stuck-antenna-freed-jupiter-bound-spacecraft.html
Here is how they did it:
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Juice_s_RIME_antenna_breaks_free
Saturday, April 8, 2023
Europa -- "Attempt No Landing There."
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Curious Marc's Lab and Workshop
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
SolderSmoke Podcast #85 With Mike Herr WA6ARA June 8, 2008 WIZARD ISLAND!
When I was putting this podcast up on YouTube, I needed a picture of Mike Herr WA6ARA who was my guest on this episode. I found a picture of Mike activating a summit... THE SUMMIT OF WIZARD ISLAND! That is Wizard Island (above). Mike and his wife are shown at the summit (below).