Sadly, the original 1970s MITRA-125 computer which controlled almost every aspect, including responding to the displacement sensors and controlling the simulator’s movements, lamp, and displays, was defective. This central control unit clearly needed to be replaced. “Fortunately, the program in operation on the MITRA-125 was available as a hard copy. So we decided to replace the old computer with a new system,” says Gerold. The only issue: it was all in French. Scanning in the several-thousand-page document and using text recognition software helped, but in some cases the type had faded so much that the characters could not be recognised. “We sometimes had to approach the correct parameter values by trial and error,” says Gerold, but new C-based simulator software for Raspberry Pi was eventually written.
magpi.raspberrypi.com
