MicroGoTo
Hardware- 6 Devlogs
- 33 Total hours
Motorising astronomical mounts. Complicated as that...
Motorising astronomical mounts. Complicated as that...
Finally working as intended. There are some things to polish and one logic algorithm to write and a readme to make and a guide and … I still have to make many things, but it finally works for the first stage. I have had a lot of hardware tinkering (5h+) that wasnt logged because i didnt have wifi, but i had to solder a connector 10+ times for it to work, played with the cables in the box, and wrote some more things into the main library. One TMC2209 got accidentaly damaged (i honestly dont know how), but in a way that only makes switching directions nonfunctional
. also the week before the last one, i made and designed the whole enclosure for the electronics and made major changes to the code, and also tested a lot. When testing in the field last week, the motors were squealing as if i were terturing them, and i accidentaly did (by giving them too much current), then i moved some cables in the box and the squealing magically stopped and never returned… The cables and other electronic parts must be ragebaiting me… Context for photos: The full setup is for testing, the long focal length is to see any trailing better than lower FLs, the box is the thing i talked about. The image is a 32s exposure brightened to see the stars better, made with the mount, Canon 1200D and a bresser 700/70 telescope. I cant see any trailing in there! (there is still a error that gives 1.3 degrees of error per day which im working on correcting rn.
Currently reworking the library to be morre user friendly and less of a problem to edit in the future (i hope), found out i have a lot of mistakes such as wrong return types, so there is a lot to do…
I accidentaly fried a arduino uno while testing the last stages of hardware and i almost lost all hope, because i was supposed to be testing it on a astronomical summer camp next week, but apparently not. i will order one to ship there so that i can test for at least 4 days. Will upload the last stages of the first stage of hardware, which is a control box, motors and the shield. Wish me luck ;](photo is there only so i can post this devlog)
devlog: i forgot to make one a really long time :( but at least im trying it now on real parts, currently making the custom library drive two motors at once and read serial signals at the same time (i have no idea what the problem is :( )
Found another way to achieve relatively precise stepping! I wanted to first use two timer compare interrupts, but then i though about it for a day, and found out that i can do it with one (with a cost of potential precision, which can be compensated for), and other libraries do it like this too!
If you wish to make a conversion for a EQ5 mount to a automatic GoTo Motorised system from scratch, you must first invent digitalWrite() and pinMode(). (currently playing with registers, finding out which approach to stepping is optimal and finding out that Serial.println() cant automatically combine variables into one output :( )