LeMans Factory Dyno Simulator

[Joe Travers]

Ran across this and found it very interesting. Check out this dyno simulator built from relay circuits to recreate actual test results from the previous years' LeMans race for the '67 427 GT40. It took a lot of money and ingenuity to put this together for one racing season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxP__UP ... nel=BarryR

Joe

[Jims65cyclone]

It's amazing, when you think about it now, how the work of that room full of relays and contactors could be accomplished today with a laptop, a PLC and few stepping motors.

Jim

[Joe Travers]

It's amazing, when you think about it now, how the work of that room full of relays and contactors could be accomplished today with a laptop, a PLC and few stepping motors.

Considering the times, this was very time consuming and expensive for one race simulation.
I'm fond of analog technology.

Joe

[Jims65cyclone]

I read once that the 1969 lunar lander contained the computer technology equivalent to a Commodore 64 (read 64K of memory!) computer. All the rest was analog based.

Jim

[Joe Travers]

I read once that the 1969 lunar lander contained the computer technology equivalent to a Commodore 64 (read 64K of memory!) computer. All the rest was analog based.

My late uncle worked for NASA on the Saturn missions, stationed @ Cape Canaveral. He retired and started a private computer business in the early '70s. IIRC, a very young female mathematician wrote the program for the mission. Took a ton of paper to print it all out. Had a picture of it long ago.

Joe

[comethead]

That’s cool Joe! I think the Ford V Ferrari movie showed something like that

[Joe Travers]

Onboard digital telemetry took most of the effort out of racing many years ago

Back in the '80s, graduate engineers all had programmable calculators and plugged all of the equations they needed into them to make accurate calculations. By the '90s, software packages had been developed so they could plug and play, eliminating the need to know the equations. Digital technology is producing a lot of soft engineering, in a sense. Mistakes are made because there isn't a lot of effort put into knowing the fundamentals.
I'm glad I'm retired!

Joe

[Jims65cyclone]

It's nice to have the tools to do it for you and make it quicker and easier. But, you still have to have the understanding necessary to know whether the tools are lying to you.

Jim

[Joe Travers]

It's nice to have the tools to do it for you and make it quicker and easier. But, you still have to have the understanding necessary to know whether the tools are lying to you.

Quicker and easier is cheaper, not necessarily better

Joe