28/12/2024
Exploring Apollo’s Legacy on a Handlet™ (Raspberry Pi-based Computer)
We’ve been having a blast running the Virtual AGC emulator on my Handlet™, a compact Raspberry Pi-powered device. It’s incredible to think that this small, modern board can host the exact assembly-language software that guided Apollo astronauts to the Moon! Watching the Luminary and Colossus code in action feels like stepping back into 1969, where each instruction mattered for mission success.
This project has allowed us to dive into the authentic Apollo Guidance Computer code base, exploring everything from priority-based real-time scheduling to memory constraints the size of a few kilobytes. The open-source community behind Virtual AGC has done an amazing job preserving and documenting the code—and, on the Handlet™, I get to experience it in an ultra-portable, hands-on way.