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Apollo Simulator Wiring
Most of the work so far has been pretty fun and interesting, but now it’s time for the tedious part: wiring every device and LED across the entire panel. I started by building the small protoboards that hold the LED…
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Apollo Simulator Mission Map
I wanted the mission map, located under the desk’s lid, to be a guide for the entire mission. I settled on the idea that the top half would educate them on the different parts of spacecraft so they could visually…
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Apollo Simulator Desk
With the panels printed, the simulator needed a proper home. I wanted it to look and feel like a regular desk the kids can use for homework when they’re not flying to the Moon. Designing in Fusion I started by…
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Apollo Simulator Banana Jacks
The Wiring panel has 10 banana jacks, numbered 0 through 9. The goal of this panel was to make my kids solve math problems in order to advance the mission. The answer is a two-digit number that tells them where…
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Apollo Simulator 3D Printed Panels
With the panel layout finalized in Inkscape, it was time to turn those drawings into real panels. Each panel is 3D printed in two colors, gray with black lettering, and the general flow path to make them is as follows:…
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Apollo Simulator Panel Layout
With the electronics picked out, the next big step was figuring out how everything would actually fit together on the desk. The simulator has a lot going on: switches, buttons, displays, bar graphs, a joystick, a keypad, speakers, and status…
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Apollo Simulator Electronics
I spent some time researching the Apollo 11 mission and came up with a full list of activities that the simulation should include. They cover everything from initial launch preparation to splashdown in the Pacific. From there I was able…
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Apollo Simulator Inspiration
Several years ago I came across Jeff Highsmith’s Mission Control Desk project and immediately filed it away as something I wanted to build someday. He built a NASA-inspired control console using a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, lots of switches, LEDs, displays,…
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Nissan 370Z CAN Control
I’m continuing to play with the CAN network available on the OBD2 port located under the dash to hopefully reverse engineer its capabilities. Click here for my previous posts on this. I have started to play with the 30 service as…
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Genesis Clock
This is a departure from my usual electronics projects, but I want to share anyway. I read an article a while back about how clocks evolved into what we use today. The escapement mechanism is what makes them possible. In…
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Nissan 370Z Custom PIDs
I picked up my 370Z CAN hacking project again after others expressed interest on a 370Z forum I frequent. I ported my old VB6 project over to VB.NET and created a few more tools to help. I’ve also added standard…
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Multiple Buttons on One Microcontroller Pin
My LED Bar project uses an Arduino to process button inputs, take analog readings, update the LCD display, and control the LED strips. That’s a lot for a little microcontroller to handle and by the time I had all my…
Project Bytes
Building things that blink, beep, and occasionally fly
