🚀 go-pugleaf

I have just made the rounds of the surplus electronics shops ans I came up
  with some interesting junk. One of them is a box with a motor and some gears
  connected to four "Induction resolvers".The trouble is I don't really know
  what an induction resolver is. There are two types: One with two coils
  on the rotor and two coils on the stator and a different one with two coils
  on the rotor and four coils on the stator.
The drawing on the side of the tings suggests that the coils on the rotor are
  crossed at a 90 degree angle and the coils on the stator for the two coil
  model are also crossed at a 90 degree angle. This suggests that if I put
  two different frequency signals in one side and listened on the other
  side I could determine the position of the shaft by comparing the
  amplitude of the signals coming out of the other two coils. The phase of
  the outputs would give you a non-ambiguous angle for the shaft. This
  sounds like a ton of trouble unless it's more accurate than a normal shaft
  encoder.
Now there is this other version with four coils on the stator and I just don't
  get that one.
These are made by American Electronics Incorporated Insturment Division in
  Culver City California. They were installed in a box made by Autonetics
  (A division of American Aviation, INC)
I think that this box has something to do with either a flight simulator or
  an autopilot. My Brother inlaw used to repair flight simulators for the
  Air Force and he showed me the insides of one and talked about rotating
  shafts to control the pitch etc. That was about 15 years ago so I didn't
  understand a thing he said. But now I can guess that you could rotate a
  shaft by the pitch of the simulator and read the resolvers to get things
  like lift and drag. Or maybe input the airspeed and get lift. By varying
  the gear ratios you would simulate another airplane. Sounds pretty 
  hard-wired but it could be possible. You should remember that this thing
  was made 3/10/64 (It's 2 days older than I am) so things like digital
  computers and A/D stuff was not available for any reasonable cost.

Well that's about it. The robot has reverse now and I'll post a new status
  this weekend.
                        -Alan Kilian
-- 
 -Alan Kilian         kilian@cray.com 612.683.5499 (Work) 612.729.1652 (Home)
  Cray Research, Inc.           | 
  655 F Lone Oak Drive          | 
  Eagan  MN,     55121          |