Surprisingly it is not the camera or lens/telescope that is the most important, it is the mount! Usually, even on proper telescope setups, the mount costs twice as much as the telescope. The ability to capture the wonders of our cosmos from your backyard is truly addicting and perspective changing.Īnyone who has dabbled into the hobby (or tried to do so) knows that it is probably one of the most expensive hobbies one can get into. The existing LX200-Classic electronics can easily be used for simple, dual-axis control without aligning with the sky and using the GOTO capabilities.Īnd if you are in Alt-Az configuration, simple dual-axis motor control won't work at all.Astrophotography is an amazing hobby. That is all certainly doable but it would be significantly easier and faster to just send your existing dead electronics to Ron Sampson for repair.

And have the drive rate adjustable by some user-controllable means for fine adjustments and possible even controlling the DEC axis so as to give dual-axis pointing adjustments.

It sounds like you want to set up an Arduino to drive a 12-18V bidirectional gearhead DC motor using PWM (Pulse Wave Modulation) and using a two-bit relative optical encoder for feedback speed control. Would love any advice or warnings as I get started. Has anyone on here done something like this before? Specifically with the Arduino platform. Like I said earlier, all I really want to get done is having it track the sky. I have 2 Arduino Unos already at my disposal that I'd like to use for the foundation of the control, if they have enough memory to hold all required programming. I have a decent amount of experience with programming, motor control, and microprocessors/controllers so I'm thinking about getting started on a little project to rebuild my lost parts.

While I do enjoy the challenge of finding stuff on my own(was never a big fan of the GoTo function),I do miss the motors keeping stuff in the eyepiece once I found it.

So, after moving around over the past 5 years and having my scope in storage at random locations, I managed to lose all the wires and keypad for the scope.

Arduino stellarium