Project Radar Boards Schiphol Control

display in use (top left hand corner)

We got a [pile of Control Tower displays from Schiphol airport (or Eurocontrol, etc)] used for tracking what is in the air.

They are basically small 2-3 CPU boards on a common RS 485 bus or on RS 232. One CPU is purely for programming. The other is the main board and handles the traffic on the bus (it may be ASTERIX format?) and the other handles the display. They are interconnected by a TTL serial on 9600 8N1. Each box also contains a high quality PSU.

The programming chip is also 9600 8N1 and contains some debugging tooling. Photo below shows the testpoints used for programming.

But easiest may be to use normal ATMEL programmeing on MISO/MOSI - which are nicely broken out on the connector.

Code

Some fairly functional code: https://github.com/MakerSpaceLeiden/AirtrafficControlDisplaysSchiphol

Bestand:Schiphol-first-light.mov
grote (50229) display eerste test-tekst (youtube)

Schiphol Airtraffic Control displays

main board 50xxxboard 50.028board 50219board 50226board 50227board 50228board 50229board 7003-asy

Main Board 50XXX series

Board 50.028

Board 50219

Board 50226

Board 50227

Board 50228

Board 50229

Board 7003-asy

Om een van de hierboven ge-"transclude"d pagina's te wijzigen, bezoek de pagina via Categorie:DisplayBoardsSchiphol.

Datasheet displays

50228 and 50229 use PD44x (PD4435, red) displays. 50.028 and 50219 use DLO3416 (red). 50227 uses DLO1414 (smaller 4-digit display, red). 7003-assy uses PD2473 (green) (PD44x datasheet).

PD44x
Code in https://github.com/MakerSpaceLeiden/AirtrafficControlDisplaysSchiphol/blob/main/shared/pd44.c

DLx3416
DLx1414
PD2573

Various people hack them

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/okini393939/5148872258
• https://github.com/TiNredmc/PD443X_Lib
• https://github.com/TiNredmc/PD443Xclock

Requirements for development

In general an AVR compiler, baseline libc and a programmer is needed.

You will need an AVR programmer. A simple one like [USBasp] should do. It has been tested against an [SK500].

For 'talking' to it - you will need a 5 volt tolerant [USB to TTL Serial] adaptor (or connect something like an Arduino or ESP32 to it. You may need a [5to3Volt level] https://www.tinytronics.nl/shop/nl/communicatie-en-signalen/level-converters/robotdyn-spi-i2c-uart-bi-directionele-logic-level-converter-4-kanaals converter]].

Requirements Apple MacOSX

When using ports install:

    sudo port instal avr-gcc avr-libc avrdude

Also install avr-binutils and avr-gdb if you want to do debugging.

Requirements Linux

In general something like

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install avr-libc binutils-avr gcc-avr avrdude

should do.