If you follow the channel, you know that RRauction recently offered an Apollo guidance
computer which we helped identify as being the sibling of the very one we restored. You can
imagine we followed the auction closely and actually bid on it, but as expected,
it ended up into stratospheric, or should I say, orbital territory,
close to three hundred thousand dollars, outside our collective reach. But all was not lost,
since our little group won several interesting items from this auction, which I hope to share
with you in due time. Let's start with mine, and since you saw the title you know at least
what one of them is. So unfortunately it's much smaller than an AGC so you know I didn't get it.
You can see a little bit of it. It's written in Russian. It is a clock from a Soyuz,
supposedly has been flown, and so we are going to have interesting circuits in there. So of
course the Soyuz capsule is this famous round green thingy attached to that other famous
pointy silver thingy. I am actually crusty enough that I remember this very symbolic
mission from my childhood, one of the few things I remember from the Apollo program.
They probably never imagined that the Soyuz spacecraft would have such a long career,
and would become the only vehicle capable to get the American astronauts to the space
station. Nice consolation prize from not having been able to get the AGC. So for those who are
good in Russian what does it all mean? Hour, minutes, seconds, that's easy. Minutes seconds,
probably an event counter. That's, so, останов (ostanov), this button here means stop. Switches,
oh those are nice, those are nice switches. It has a - oh that's going to be interesting to interface
to. Oh that one, that is weird. So it has a lot of pins, like more than just power. Little
wires coming out and this coming out. Looks like a tamper-proof screws. It says "Onboard
Clock Soyuz TM Capsule". We think this is hour minute seconds, minute seconds, this is enter,
this is start - operate - stop. Oh this must be a chronometer - yeah this is a stop watch - start,
stop, reset. It's start stop reset. This is mission time probably. This is stopwatch,
this is on, and here we don't quite know. This is "correction", this gets translated sometimes
as "frequency', sometimes as "rate", sometimes as "job". What were those two, so "operate" and maybe
"standby", something like that. I saw it here, somewhere in the text. Can you - oh there it is,
I saw it. Alright, so that is the - from Steve Jurvetson you said? Yeah. It looks like it's the
analog predecessor, that's the same format, it's also displayed on the same, with the same tag as
mine over there, and I saw the clock further down. Down, down, down, there it is. This is
my clock. So apparently the Soyuz panel used to have a beautiful analog clock on the upper left
side which was later swapped out for this digital clock which took exactly the same space. You can
see another picture of it here. Okay, clock of current times is what that FTB means. Oh it's
Moscow time. Right and up is announcement time, upcoming time. So in other words you want it
to tell you the time to some event like fire the retro at, in 18 seconds and it counts down. And it
can be timed from an internal pulse generator or from the external RV4110. Oh it is controlled,
stopped and started by external things. So you can - cool, you can use it as an egg timer. For your
engine fire. Egg timer, to cook eggs! Or you could sync it up with your Italian flip clock. You've
probably noticed through my videos that I have a budding collection of odd clocks in the lab,
including a loud Italian Dator 10, and the Soyuz clock is slated to join that display.
So should we open it up? Yes! Alright, we buy it, we hack it. Since I paid for it do
I get to take it apart? Yes! Oh it has been taken apart before, you can tell.
That's holding pretty good. So it might be your back connector right
there. Yeah. Instead it has wires coming through it that have been cut over here, I don't know what
that means. It does look like the back connector is the one that's holding the thing,
but I don't have screws. Okay, so the stuff that we thought might be a coax is actually a hidden
screw or a protected screw. So I was right that is like a tamper resistant screw. Yeah,
I'm having problems tampering. That's to prevent tampering on the back side of the Soyuz. So indeed
the clock had tamper resistant screws. This is really odd, I can't imagine why you would need
this. Fortunately they were not CuriousMarc resistant, just screws covered with some epoxy
in a cup, fairly easy to take care of. So - oh that's neat - it's opening, so there is definitely
the little wire. It looks like an afterthought, is that somebody, for demonstration purposes,
added wires and made them go through the screw holes. So these have been added from the original.
So maybe if you power that through this. Someone wanted to animate it. How do I get that through.
There we go. Aha. Oh, that's nice. Woohoo. It actually has components! Oh my, a lot
of them. Oh, it has little Apollo-like integrated circuits in it. Woo that's nice.
Conformal coated. Well this is way more complicated than I thought. So this is
probably the very early version. OK I don't think I'll be reverse engineering this one. What? That's
your work! What do you mean? It's got like mystery ICs and many of them. Yes! So it has your name on
it! So is that LED or electroluminescent display? LEDs. OK, so it's not generating like hundreds of
volts. But it's got a power supply obviously. This is pretty hard to see what's in there. But
you see ICs, I see the flat-packs. What is the square? Oh, there's an interesting thing here,
there's a selector for frequency? No we think that's an inductor. Just the sockets for the
inductors. So we can just hook power up to those wires and crank up the power until we
see something on the display? Or something smokes. Fifty/fifty. So you think it's going to be 5 volts
TTL? Looks like early RTL chips. Look at this wiring harnesses. It's just like boards put in,
and then the wire is soldered in, and it never comes apart? Well there's screws all over the
place here, so you can definitely - you can just splay them out but you can't detach them. Oh and
the screws have been locked in epoxy. But it's single layer? No two layers PCBs. So
what's the date on this? Well it says 11-11-83. 11-11-83. 83-2. This one says 15-11-83. Okay so
if we want to take this thing further apart - wow look there is a grounding
that's not going to come up with it. Ah yeah, it might come up this way. Let me try that.
hmm
Oof. Okay, okay, guys it opens up! Ooh, aah, oh! That's nice. Not much gold eh? This one looks
like it was a rework. This one is definitely surface mount. That's through hole. This looks
so much more ancient than 83. So let's see, this is what they fly to the ISS? So 83 is over here.
Looks like about 1970 if I had to put a date on it. Alright. Yes this really has ICs, but no,
it's primitive ICs. The color of the boards too. It looks like SMS cards. And then this
is 83 too. This is 84! This has an 84 date on it, this big transistor.
It says 84 right here. So I wonder if we can find a data book for any of these ICs.
This is from the picture we just took. This is yours, and then this is the same same pert
on eBay. How did you find that? Just entered the number? Yeah, six dollars. What does it
do? It's a voltage regulator, adjustable 3 to 12 volts. And I spent a good hour extracting just a
few screws. The ICs may look old for their build date, but the screws are absolutely first-class.
All right. Here we go. Ooh! Ah, I have your crystal. What do you think? That
definitely looks like a crystal. And then you have the drivers for the
LEDs. Alright. What does that look like that? Yeah. So it opens up like a book, look at that!
That's beautiful. And look at how much rework there is, on something that - they must have been
made since the seventies, right, and it's like one - two - three wires. Someone said: make it
the same! Yeah, it looks like they didn't revise their PCBs to clean it up, right,
just kept doing the same thing forever. Did this one actually go into space? That's how
it's advertised on the auction. Whether it really did, go figure. But it said: flown. It's got dots
on the chips so at least it they look like they are certified. It was certainly assembled - it
was super hard to take apart. By flown, they mean they sent it here airmail. Look at that good one,
right they had some - yeah, now I am less enthusiastic about going on a Soyuz rocket now.
Man. Well, it's well built. They have random bodge wires running around but at least the screws
in tightly. And then the ones that were really difficult - the ones on the side, my goodness,
super hard. I was thinking about this module over lunch and figured I'd come back, and things would
make sense. And no, it's just as bizarre - and it's just horrendously complicated for a clock.
Alright. Oh, some have been replaced. Those look very much like normal seven
segment display. Yeah but there's some that have had repairs. Yeah. OK, look
at how much variation there is between each of them. Oh, this one looks like
it's gluing. Yes, so this one has been reworked and re-glued. It's not looking too good.
Here is my clock, all disassembled, with the very uneven LEDs - they look like made
by amateurs. The driver board, the logic boards, we think that's the oscillator,
plenty plenty plenty of logic boards. What does that do? The power supply,
and we are back. Should I put it back together or you want to leave it like
this so we can we can separate some more boards and we can look at it more tomorrow
or another day? Yeah I'd say leave it open, because there is more study to be done here.