The Swiss Military Museum's Tank Simulator Blends 1970s Army Tech with a Modern Raspberry Pi
"Driving" a camera around a model village to teach tank operations, this simulator is a fascinating blend of the analog and digital.
A tank-driving simulator, built in the 1970s to allow users to drive a miniature tank through a tiny model battlefield, has received a very modern upgrade thanks to a Raspberry Pi single-board computer — bringing joy to the Swiss Military Museum's visitors.
"In the 1980s, the Swiss Army had the idea to design and build tank simulators," Tom Scott, whose latest video walks through what is now an attraction at the Swiss Military Museum in Full, explains. "But this was well before computer-generated images. They couldn't create a virtual world. So instead they built a wonderful example of 70s analog technology."
In effect, the Swiss military designers behind the simulator — which aimed to familiarize its users with the experience of driving a tank without the need to actually put them at the helm of expensive and potentially dangerous mechanized hardware — built a model village, and added a movable camera system to act as the "tank."
A computerized system allowed for different "terrain" to be selected, moving the camera as it bounces along a dirt track or glides along a smooth road — or even lifting up above the ground for a bird's eye view.
While many were built for training purposes, the only remaining example is in the hands of the museum — but needed an upgrade to keep it running. "Everything except the computer part is original, but [that] was too old and you don't find parts easily," museum guide Remo Fuchs explains. "So we had to rebuild it on a Raspberry Pi."
The rebuilt simulator is available to visitors at the Swiss Military Museum in Full now, with information on attending available on the official website; Scott's full video is available on his YouTube channel.