Building a full-scale Apollo Command Module replica
The mission timer was the first electronic piece I designed and built for the project. The mission timer provided a continuous display of the Mission Elapsed Time, or time in seconds, minutes, and hours from liftoff. Many of the scheduled events during an Apollo mission were directly synchronized with the
Now that some of the electronic components I ordered have come in, I can get the lighting on the FDAI done. Looking at a real FDAI, there are two parts to the lighting — the rate scales and the ball itself. To light the rate scales, I decided to insert
The DSKY kits come with battery packs for power, holding 6 AA batteries for a total of 9 volts. However, I want the DSKY units in the Command Module to run off of the DC busses (“Main Bus A” or “Main Bus B”). The DC busses will be 12 volts,
The “8-ball” in my FDAI replica has one degree of freedom of movement within the PBC “yoke.” Now to give it a second. I used a hole saw to cut a circle out of a piece of MDF which was just the right size to fit in the 3-inch side
While waiting for the 1/64″ stripe dry transfer decals to arrive, I started work on the face of the FDAI. At first, this looked like it would be really hard, but after a bit of study and thinking I realized it was just a bunch of layers. So, after figuring
One of the things I knew going into this project was that I would need to make a decent replica of the Flight Director Attitude Indicator, or FDAI, commonly known to the Apollo astronauts as the “8-ball.” This was a mechanism similar to the artificial horizon of normal aircraft, but
This is where I deviated from the regular instructions a bit. Since my DSKY units will be mounted in a panel, they would be powered by the on-board power from the Command Module instead of the AA battery pack. Also, I would have a different speaker setup inside the CM
Any replica of the Apollo Command Module would not be complete without a flight computer. In actuality, the flight computer itself (the Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC), was never visible – it was hidden in a rack behind a panel. What WAS visible was a pair of interface terminals called
