Fix the past with Raspberry Pi

Suggestion by Peter Robinson / Simon Moore

Current status: it seems unlikely that the EDSAC reconstruction project will have a working chassis ready in time for group project public demonstrations in March 2013. It may be necessary to defer this project until 2014.

The pioneering Cambridge EDSAC computer is now being reconstructed at the national computing museum(??). However, the radio valves, mercury delay lines, and other components of EDSAC are all far less reliable than modern technology. This means it will be a real challenge keeping the thing running! Your task is to build an embedded diagnostic monitor device, using Raspberry Pi, that can continuously monitor the health of the reconstructed EDSAC, warning operators when something needs to be fixed, or perhaps that it is about to fail. We expect there will be multiple Raspberry Pi's in each chassis or frame of the EDSAC. They might even be able to compensate for temporary failures, imitating the behaviour of that chassis to keep the rest of the system working until a failed component is replaced.