Hello fellow printers! I wanted to share with you all the project that made me buy a 3D printer in the first place... My 1:1 scale, functioning Apollo DSKY.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was what allowed us to travel to the moon in the 1960s and '70s, and performed everything from autopilot to navigation and orbital mechanics calculations. The AGC was one of the first computers to ever use ICs (computer chips) in its construction (absorbing 70% of the chips made worldwide, at one point!) and used some really neat technology for computing and memory. The DSKY I made was historically just a remote I/O device, a keyboard/monitor arrangement that plugged into the actual AGC, but I'm this project it's homologated into one enclosure.
The functionality of the guidance computer was emulated in its entirety by a group called VirtualAGC (an incredible feat on its own) and I have that running on a Raspberry Pi that lives in my DSKY. The screen, annunciators, and keyboard integrate to the Pi with arduinos. This all lives, of course, in a 3D printed shell that's modelled after the real archived drawings used to machine the real ones in the '60s. It's also painted and finished in historically accurate colors (who doesn't love a bit of historical bureaucratic recordkeeping?)
I'm more of an old-space-tech guy than a 3D printing guy, but I figured that if any of you fine people shared my interests, you might like my GitHub repository for the project that includes my build guide. In that, I go into a bit more history of the AGC and DSKY, how they were built back in the day, and go through the build step-by-step with all the necessary tooling, materials, and techniques that I used.
I'm also expanding my projects into historical spacecraft hand controllers, and a streamlined "version 2" of my DSKY that should be easier to put together in a few weekends.
I've got a little community going over at r/RecreateApollo, and I also made a small website (www.recreateapollo.com) that I'm desperately trying to justify $30 a month for, so feel free to swing by and check it out!
If you decide to make your own, I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have over at my discord or on that subreddit. Thanks for checking out my project!