malc-c

I think you'll struggle to find a company that specializes in custom observatories that can meet your specification. Have a read through the DIY Observatories here as there is lots of information on how people built their own, or companies used to build and supply traditional shed designs with roll off roofs. Mind you 4m x 4m will require some engineering to be able to span that width and roll. If you come across a company called Home Observatories UK DONT place an order. There is a long thread where members have gone as far as court action to get back their deposits following failed orders. The alternative would be to contact Pulsar who produce Dome observatories - I'm sure they must have used reputable builders to work with when siting a dome on a large structure. Or contact a local builder who could draw up plans and quote for its construction. You will need planning permission for a building that size, especially if the site is a third party (I had to get planning permission when our society wanted to build their observatory on land owned by an open farm in Letchworth.) Good luck and I would suggest documenting your project in the DIY section so that the next person asking a similar question can learn from your experience, plus it will make for an interesting read

Given that an HEQ5 is over a grand for the mount alone, getting one with a 200P on top for £600 is such a bargain (assuming its in good condition). The motors and controller in an HEQ5 are superior to those used on an EQ5 so (in theory at least) give better control for guiding... I voted 200P / HEQ5... but then I'm biased 🙂

I've attached the driver that I've used with my QHY5 camera for the past decade. It runs fine on Windows 7 and Windows 10 QHY5.zip

It's worth checking the solder joints as suggested, but seeing that Olly has tried an alternative motor board and still gets the same result would rule that out. Also I'm sure Olly would have pushed these connectors home when exchanging the boards. The fact the handset runs through its initial set up routine rather than reporting a "No response" message suggests the microcontroller(s) on the motor board is/are working and that serial communications are established. The fact that it gives every indication that the mount is working fine but the motors are not running IMO points to either an issue with the driver stage of the motorboard, or with the actual motors which are the only things that have not been swapped out. I have never seen the insides of one of these mounts, but if they use the same control boards as synta mounts (an EQ6 in this case) the the 33v that is fed to the motors is generated from the 12v supply. With the motors connected it's worth checking if voltages are present between pins 1 and 2, and then again between 3 and 4 of the connector. Again, the fact that two motorboards would rule a failure of the A3959 driver chips, so my focus would be to check the wiring between the connectors of the stepper motors and the steppers themselves. The pairs of coils of the motors are between 1st and 2nd, with the second between 3rd and 4th pins of the connector, worth checking with a DVM to see if there is an open circuit by removing the connector at the board and test the pins in the connector. Also check any intermediate connectors between the board and motors if there is an intermediate connectors. If the motors and cable harness check out then I too am at a loss, and would suggest Olly contacts the retailer for advice, or Avalon's technical services as there may well be other test points that can be checked

Basic communications: When the EQDIR cable is connected to the computer it will be recognized as a new COM port. Open Device Manager and having made a note of the comport click on properties and check the baud rate is set to the default 9600. If its FTDI based then there should be no need to download and install any drivers, but if you do need them the VCP drivers can be obtained from the link in the above post. If it uses Prolific chipset then you'll need to download the correct driver from prolific website or the cable providers website. Close device manager. Having installed EQMOD and the ASCOM platform navigate to EQASCOM > Toolbox. Launch the toolbox utility. With eqmod.exe selected click on driver setup. In the toolbox application, set the port setting to match that of the one you noted. Enter all the location details and click OK. Then with the mount powered up and connected select the ASCOM connect. It should launch EQMOD and and communicate with the mount. Set the speed / rate value to 4 and move the mount via NSWE buttons. Once confirmed close EQMOD by selecting ASCOM disconnect on the tool box, and close the toolbox application. Now you should be able to select the mount from NINA or whatever application used for target acquisition or guiding. - I don't use NINA so can't advise on that, but it should be easy enough to select it from some menu as shown in the post above

For those of us who don't use that software how does X and Y relate to the normal RA and DEC axis.

Did find this which suggest using the WDM driver inbuilt to windows... Couldn't confirm it works as I suffered the second driver state failure whilst the camera was connected and I tried setting the resolution ! The 205 was gifted to me as part of a synscan board repair.... maybe this was why ? For now I'll stick with my old but trusty QHY5

And then mid post windows crashed into a recovery mode stating the device failed in power up - restarting !

Well you got further than I did ! Camera was connected and no errors shown in device manager

According to SVBony's website their cameras have native support in PHD2, and on the PHD2 website the current version of 2.6.11 states "Updated camera support: Svbony, Touptek, ZWO ASI" - This version was released February 2022..... Would have thought 18 months would have been enough time to have ironed out any bugs. I have just installed PHD2 on the PC as I too have a SV205 camera. The camera installed on windows 10 with out the need of additional drivers. Running PHD2 for the first time I went through the wizard, selecting SVBony Camera from the list of supported cameras. I was then asked if the camera was connected and PHD2 would then obtain the pixel size etc. I confirmed it was... I was then presented with a pop up stating that PHD2 could not connect to the camera, but could manually add in the pixel size etc later. However, when selecting the camera it fails No error in device manager - At present I don't have any other software to try with this camera, and this is my main PC rather than the one in the observatory. But this does indeed confirm that despite that 18 months since announcing SVBony camera's were supported in PHD2, this particular camera isn't.

Here's an image of the floor supported by hangers off the dwarf wall Then the framing was started

William, thank you for an excellent description. As others have already mentioned, get rid of the ST4 cable, connect the camera directly to the PC via USB, and use the USB socket on the synscan unit to connect the mount to your computer (you may need to download the driver from Synta's website. Once installed set the connection speed of the VCP to 115200). From my experience calibration needs to be done with a star that is close to the intersection of the local meridian with the celestial equator as that is the point where there is the greatest angular movement. Set up pulse guiding in the section of EQMOD of the same name by placing ticks in both RA and DEC rate check boxes and set the sliders to x0.9. Hope that helps

Browsing a site that sells scientific gear, mostly surplus from universities I came across this listing CELESTRON G8N Telescope and Firstscope 70 EQ £150 inc VAT...

I went all in and built mine close to building standards... DPM in a dwarf wall from which 6" x 2" softwood but treated joists were laid, with 50mm insulation under the warm room. Everything above the floor was made from studwork, keeping to 16" centers. The frame work was clad in a quality T&G shiplap, and is treated to an annual application of a decent fence / shed preserve. I dismantled the scope as I was intending to move this summer and I inspected the underside whilst pulling cables back and the joists are as good as they were the day they were installed over 12 years ago.

Still doesn't explain in detail how things are connected. Is the guide camera connected to the PC via USB or are you using the ST4 port ? You need to give a more detailed reply so people can fully understand your configuration and also what your work flow was (did you run the assistant utility to calibrate PHD2 first ?) I googled your mount and searched for any tutorials and found this - Hope that helps

You need to provide details on how you have set this up. How are the mount and computer connected, and the software (NINA, EQmod, GSS ??). How you do your polar alignment would also help. This should allow people to diagnose whats going on and how best to calibrate and start guiding

I've used 3DPrint to produce some items and was happy with them. They have a minimum order value of £50, which for me was OK as the items were small, so I got 20 off (servo motor mount for model railway point control).

The two screens will have the same 16 chr x 2 row spec, but the COG (chip on display) inside them will be different. This is evident by the increased pin count on the connector on the later handset. There is a very good chance placing the LCD from the older handset could result in the newer working LCD being damaged, or the older LCD damaging the newer PCB as pins on the LCD header could be shorted. This is assuming the flex cables are the same width and the older flex cable will fit

I don't think the screens are the same - The connector in the top image has far more pins on the flex cable than the low, which has just 16 on a 1mm pitch. Whilst they may be physically the same size, the controllers will be different. Regretfully the screens are custom for Synta handsets. I had one donated to the exchange program, it works just fine but the screen was damaged - finding replacements has resulted in dead ends.

Not sure what the trend is but so far I've had three EQ6 boards donated to the cause... 🤔 The latest contribution was sent by @bottletopburly . This was an old board as it used 2 x 16F73's rather than 16F886's, and had a different fault compared to most of those discussed in this thread. The DEC axis worked perfectly fine, however the RA was very jerky on the spooling up and down but would sound sweet on full slew speed. It would also only run in one direction regardless what direction the mount was instructed to move. The board had already been worked on as a jumper wire to one of the A3959SLBT drivers, but worryingly there were a cluster of via's missing close to the same chip. These boards are four layer and looking at the two outer sides it's quite possible that these were blind so connected to an internal layer rather then through to the bottom layer. I tried replacing both drivers on the RA, which made no difference, and as the PIC controllers were running an old 1.06v of firmware and lacked the bootloader the firmware couldn't be updated. So this board was used as a donor board with all 3959's and some of the regulators being removed. Even though this board was beyond repair it was still fun, and gave me more practice at replacing surface mounted components. My thanks to all those SGL members who have donated their old non working boards to the cause. The two EQ6 boards that have already been repaired are now ready to find new homes should anyone need them....

Well there is a lesson to be learnt on both sides. I was on the assumption that the firmware was up to date... I should have asked at the beginning if you had done that rather than take it for granted.

I guess the moral of this story is you should always carry a spare G-String with you 😁

What you are experiencing seems to be a common issue with NINA having connection issues. You could also try Green Swamp Server as an alternative to EQMOD and see if you get the same connection issues with NINA, or if last nights experience of running for hours without a dropped connection. One other possible cause that one or two SGL member discovered is when using some astro cameras as they basically hogged the USB bandwidth whilst capturing which resulted in the mount not being able to report back to EQMOD / GSS when it polled the mount. Once the planetarium software passes on the instruction to slew to target and the mount has completed the slew and acquired the target, there is very little traffic between EQMOD / GSS and the mount, but it only needs one transmission to be lost and it seems game over with the dreaded lost connection / mount not responding messages

How many times can you drop a telescope !!

HEX files are loaded in two ways. The first is programming the controller ( PIC microcontroller, ARM based processor, AVR etc) directly. This requires a small bit of hardware which connects to the PC, with its outputs connected to certain pins on the processor, normally via a header pin. The hardware supplies high voltage (typically 12v) to one pin and power to Vcc and Vdd. This then places the processor in programming mode. The last two wires connect to the Data and Clock lines on the processor. Once programming software has detected the processor you can then load the HWX file and click write on the PC software to "burn " it to the chip. The second way depends on how the processor was originally programmed. If programmed with a small bit of code called a bootloader then you can use the same connection that is used to control the mount and a small application to upload the HEX file. Most modern goto mounts tend to have bootloaders coded into them form the factory to allow the end user to update the mounts firmware through a small app. From my limited research it seem that the EQ Astro uses both a 18F series PIC micro and a large ATMEL Mega - Why I have no idea as most Synscan units have two 16F series PICs, one for each axis. The fact it uses EQMOD suggest that it uses the SYNTA protocol but has pre-programmed settings for various mounts it's designed to work with. Maybe contact the manufactures to ask what's needed and if the file you have can be uploaded via the bootloader. My gut feeling is that you are going to need a programmer and program the MCUs directly.