Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-08-11 11:19, Rob wrote:

Put a Raspberry Pi in each station to blink the lights and act upon
the buttons...


Is there a point in doing this versus just having a static room with all
displays off?

It was my understanding that they wanted to restore it to working
condition capable of running a demo like it was during operation.

Whether it is pointless or not, well that is another question...

Cool goal, but a hell of a lot of work and even more money. If running,
it would take a lot of electricity (which generates heat which
necessitates cooling, which costs more electricity). Laudable goal, but
it would cost a fortune. Things like capacitors will have to be
replaced because they do go bad after that many decades.

It is a common problem for all restoration and preservation projects.
Personally I don't see the value in preserving everything that we have
once done in working order. It would cost a lot of money, that can't
be spent on new things. When we want to keep everything we have once
built, the burden will become more and more for every generation after
us. IMHO it is better to make room for new things.

It would have been better to keep and re-digitize the magtapes that
were recorded during the missions. We would have the high-quality
pictures to look at. Even preserving image material costs money, but
less than all those physical things.