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Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

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Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#91
post #3

This is awesome! The media loves to say your pocketwatch is more powerful than X form $date. This is a fun technical rundown. I think at some point we have to start talking about how far from optimized we are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS comes to mind when talking about what can be done in fasm. Are we ever going to get compilers to the point where we can squash things down to that size and efficiency? Is t…

What kind of hardware do pocket (/wrist) watches run? (Not smart watches) How much RAM/ROM/CPU? E.g. those famous Casios with LCD.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#92
post #49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a USB pd charger could try to put out 18v to a device that's expecting 5v though, and that can still burn out the device

Assuming reasonable charger design (ie. at least some overcurrent protection) the internal ESD protection of USB-C port in the device that only ever expects 5V (think SRV05-4) should be more than enough to safely trip the overcurrent protection in the charger (or overload it enough that the destroyed component is the charger and not the device). On the other hand there are documented cases of USB-C PD between two dev…

The problem is that the ESD protection can only stop short duration spikes. The device would have to have a fuse (or other overcurrent protection) to prevent the 20V @ 5A as allowed in the USB spec from destroying the ESD circuit.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#93
> The CYPD4225 is definitely not rated for space. I have no idea if it would work in space.

There lays the rub. Even today computers rated for space are relatively underpowered compared to consumer hardware. Comparing the microcontrollers used in USB-C wall warts to the AGC is like saying your car has a higher top speed than a tank. You wouldn't be wrong but you'd also be purposely ignoring some key differences in design goals.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#94
post #3

This is awesome! The media loves to say your pocketwatch is more powerful than X form $date. This is a fun technical rundown. I think at some point we have to start talking about how far from optimized we are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS comes to mind when talking about what can be done in fasm. Are we ever going to get compilers to the point where we can squash things down to that size and efficiency? Is t…

What kind of hardware do pocket (/wrist) watches run? (Not smart watches) How much RAM/ROM/CPU? E.g. those famous Casios with LCD.

God bless Richard Stallman for open source and GitHub for making sharing it easy

https://github.com/carrotIndustries/pluto/blob/master/README...

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#95
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are architectures that are just fundamentally C-hostile. Perhaps the most famous one is 6502. No efficient way to implement stack based parameter passing, generic pointer arithmetic, and lots of other bits and pieces. You can still use C on 6502, it's just not very fast. I guess you could define another language that mostly looks like C, but built around particular CPU architecture quirks.

What are some languages (other than its own instructions) that 6502 is friendly to?

BASIC, arguably. People often say C is 'high level assembly' but in some ways BASIC is closer with the absence of block structure, scopes, etc. Control flow in a BASIC (basic BASIC, not fancy newer BASIC) program ends up looking a lot like that in an assembly one.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#96
post #12

And despite the fact that a wall charger has more compute power than the Saturn V, we can't actually go to the moon today. We've actually lost the ability to go. No one understands how the engines on the Saturn V work anymore. It would take years to tear them apart and analyze them, and most of the original engineers are dead. And the guidance systems would have to be built back up from scratch. Kind of sad if you th…

None of that is true. It's really annoying to see it repeated. It's even been covered on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304188 before.

There are parts of the F-1 engine that would be difficult to exactly replicate because while the engineering specs are known the exact fabrication processes weren't all documented. An exact workalike could be made for those parts that fit the specification without a problem. That new engine would need to be entirely requalified for use.

The F-1 is big and expensive and rebuilding them has long been outside of NASA's budget. If they were going to rebuild the F-1 it would be the same expense and effort to just design an entirely new engine.

This is why, for instance, the SLS is using the SSME as its first stage engines. It's a known system with a long and successful (the engine itself) flight history. It's been iterated upon and is well understood.

The design philosophy of rockets has also changed from the 60s when the Saturn was designed. Solid fuel boosters were not considered useful for Saturn but have been proven since then and have a long flight history. There's also the SpaceX/Soyuz model of an array of smaller/simpler engines. A small number of monster engines is just not needed like it was for Saturn.

The expense of the F-1 and the lack of real need has kept NASA from using them, not some loss of technology. The guidance systems...are a long long solved technology. Modern guidance systems are better than the Apollo and Saturn systems by orders of magnitude. They're far smaller which allows redundancy and still lower weight than old systems.

Since Saturn NASA has launched successful probes to every planet in the solar system and several dwarf-planets, landed several extremely long lived rovers on Mars, launched hundreds of satellites, over a hundred Shuttle missions, and assembled one of the most complex machines ever in orbit.

What's sad is the mistaken belief that Apollo was some pinnacle of capability and technological prowess for NASA.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#97
post #36
post #12

And despite the fact that a wall charger has more compute power than the Saturn V, we can't actually go to the moon today. We've actually lost the ability to go. No one understands how the engines on the Saturn V work anymore. It would take years to tear them apart and analyze them, and most of the original engineers are dead. And the guidance systems would have to be built back up from scratch. Kind of sad if you th…

We could easily go to the moon. It's just a completely useless exercise to do so, unless you can find a way to taunt China into another round of the space race. The scientific case for the moon was always weak, and most anything they could come up with has been done. Just look at the useless lets-grow-salad-in-space-oh-look-its-just-salad timesinks the ISS has been busying themselves with. So, in a way we've become m…

That's the same SpaceX that has launched 240 visible objects into orbit in the last year?

More than doubling the number of visible man made objects (~200 till the start of the SpaceX Starlink project).

And with fcc approval for another 12,000 and plans for a further 30,000.

It excites me alright, but certainly not in a good way...

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you require a 32 bit computer and I think those were 15. So no doom :(

Though, where there's a will there's a way... https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/16-bit >After the release of Doom II on the PC, the original three episodes were released to some 16-bit consoles that used special 32-bit enhancement hardware. For the Sega Genesis, the 32X allowed for additional address space to enable Doom to run its demanding resources of the time which a 16-bit system wouldn't have handled. Whereas with t…

Question was could it do it which it can’t. But yeah you could use the Apollo for controller IO and put the rest on a raspberry pi but that kinda defeats the purpose.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real fun with the AGC on landing happened on Apollo 14, with a flipped bit in the abort landing flag. Percussive maintenance temporarily flipped the bit back, giving enough time for ground control to develop a hack. Didn't they just ignore the warnings on Apollo 11? And I think it was non synced timing references rather than strictly resource availability that got them on 11

The reason for warnings on 11 was that the landing was done in what was essentially an unsupported configuration. Still the “kernel” behaved as designed, didn't run low priority task (that was not supposed to be running in the first place) and raised an warning about doing so.

Actually radar counter wasn't handled by any software task, it was hardware interrupt hardwired to steal CPU ALU cycles to increment/decrement memory location. Abnormally high steal time caused main navigation job to run too long, and it was getting scheduled again before previous instance finished. That led to memory exhaustion and BAILOUT software restart.

source: https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#100
post #3

This is awesome! The media loves to say your pocketwatch is more powerful than X form $date. This is a fun technical rundown. I think at some point we have to start talking about how far from optimized we are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS comes to mind when talking about what can be done in fasm. Are we ever going to get compilers to the point where we can squash things down to that size and efficiency? Is t…

What kind of hardware do pocket (/wrist) watches run? (Not smart watches) How much RAM/ROM/CPU? E.g. those famous Casios with LCD.

My TI Chronos "development kit" watch (AKA my normal watch) contains a CC430F6137 mcu, which has 32 kB flash and 4 kB RAM. It contains a MSP430(X) core and a CC1101 RF front-end for communicating with other accessories or a computer.

It's running the (custom/not from TI) open-source firmware openchronos-ng-elf, which is on github. When I get around to it, there are a few features I'd like to add, but it's nice just to know that I can.

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