anyone who’s into vintage aviation gear falls in like with those mysterious displays, dials, keypads, banks of knife switches. There’s a great deal of attractive in those devices, built with high requirements in a time when a great deal of it was assembled by hand.
[Jeremy Gilbert] bought a 747-200’s manage screen system (CDU)– the interface with the late ’70s in-flight computer–and is bringing it back to life in a Hackaday.io project. His goal is to get it to light up as well as operate just as if it were installed in a 747.
Of specific rate of interest is the display, which turned out to consist of a series of 5×7 matrices (seen on the right) controlled by chips nobody utilizes any type of more. However, [Jeremy] discovered a blog publish where somebody had hacked out Arduino code for a cousin of the chip, saving him a great deal of time. However, he’s got a great deal more sleuthing yet to do.
If you’re into vintage displays, we’ve pointed out a number of great ones, including the legendary Apollo DSKY as well as an remarkable retrocomputer.