malc-c

The last time I was involved with an observatory that was of the same design was back in 1993 when I was part of the team that built our local societies observatory We counterbalanced the roof section using a wire and pulley system attached to buckets of lead shot. This made opening and closing the roof a single person operation. Must say you are making a lot of progress on your build in a short space of time....

Struth, my 2.2m x 4.8m DIY build came to that amount and that included the HEQ5 mount it houses. Whilst the comments regarding PayPal is not encouraging as they would have paid HOUK on your behalf, the money trail would show that you have made payment for goods not received. But as noted by one other member, even if you win a claim through the courts it still doesn't mean you get your money back, even if you sue the person and not the company. I don't know how the law stands if a company ends up going bust, but a CCJ is still outstanding against it or the directors / owners. By that I mean in terms of they would get the full amount awarded by the courts or if they would get a portion of whats left after DWP and customs takes their lions share? With regards to scamming people... Well my take is that whilst he may not deliberately defrauding people, the fact that his site is still up and gives no indication of the problems he or the company are having is misleading and is still tantamount to fraud as its clear through this thread he lacks the means to provide the finished goods yet is still willing to take peoples money an use it for personal gain, even if that is just to pay domestic bills. The original thread that questioned if HOUK were still trading does show up in a google search, although not as a bold listing, just under related observatory posts on SGL, which is a shame as if any potential new customers discovered this and the original thread it could save them thousands of pounds in the long run

Any update on this - Has the issue been resolved ?

Fare enough. That gives you flexibility, but whatever method you follow ensure the cabling is tidy as it is a trip hazard in the confines of a building

That member last visited the forum back in January, and most of his last post were dated August 2020, so you may not get a reply having resurrected a 7 year old post. You could try sending them a DM just in case they have set their profile to provide notifications to private messages

Excellent progress, and a very solid foundation. If you are going to lay in any ducting for power (low voltage) and coms (USB) from the piers to whatever location the PSU and computer will be then it's easier to do it before you lay the flooring. Also include a draw string with the cables, as sods law says you will always need an extra cable when the floors in place and the ducting is secure.

With the thickness of the line being almost a degree against the scale that shows the inaccuracy .... 🤔 As others have said, if the alignment was perfect, the gear meshing had no backlash and the drive system was perfect then yes it should return to the same point. But these are mass produced mounts on a budget, so you will get tolerances in the mount

With increasing costs of timber it's not a fair comparison for me to tell you that my 2.2m x 4.8m observatory cost me less than £2500 including the bricks for the dwarf wall. Chances are it would be at least double in todays terms. I don't think you will get a lot of people recommending commercial observatories for the reasons you mentioned. The quotes are high and often doesn't include any ground works such as a concrete base or footings, which could be another grand on top. I was lucky, my neighbour had access to a mini excavator, which made digging the footings a lot easier and quicker, but other than that I hired a mixer, and purchased a chop saw, and other than an electric drill and electric screwdriver that was all the tools I needed. If you are sensible then there is no reason to fear the saw and your fingers will be intact. One alternative is to obtain the details of a local builder from any neighbour who's had extensions etc added to their house. If they can vouch for the work then you know the builder has decent reputation. Given the current circumstances with the cost of materials the project, either self assembly or ready made means it will be expensive, and twice the cost of undertaking such a project a couple of years earlier. One other possibility is to look for a second hand dome. If you were looking at an imaging rig then having a lot of space around the scope is not a requirement as you could operate the rig remotely. If you are visual then yes having a decent amount of space such as 8' x 8' would be needed.

Buying a commercial product is a lot more expensive than either getting a stock shed and modifying it, or buying raw materials and building it from scratch. It's not difficult, and there are loads of build threads on the forum to give you ideas. You don't have to go to the extent I went to, and if you can drill a hole and screw in a screw then you're half way there. If you still want to go down the commercial route a quick google came up with this company Outsideology Never used them, so can't say how good they are, but worth a call. Given what has been posted regarding HomeObservatories UK I would advise you stay well clear of that company. Good luck and don't forget to document the build / installation....

Carole, that doesn't sound too promising if true. But it does beg the question where has all the money he has taken as deposits, (which should at lease cover the material costs) gone. ?? If he is running into heath issues, either mentally or physically and the business is suffering, then he should have done something on the website which still gives the impression its business as usual. Taking on more orders, orders that he hasn't a chance in hell to fulfil isn't going to help his condition if it is genuine.

Hate to say it, but for a professional repair that soldering sucks !!!! - But good to hear the handset has been fixed.

Do you mean you plugged 12v supply to the handset rather than the mount ? Is this the scope you have ?

I use APT with my old Canon 400D - It supports the old serial shutter release, something which NINA does not, and when I asked on their Discord server why is the function is there but not implemented I was told to replace my camera with something that is not obsolete and uses USB like all the rest... Go figure why I don't recommend their software !!

The "no response" message is because when the handset (or EQMOD / GSS) sends out a "what mount are you" it doesn't get a response back from the motor board. On older boards (those not fitted with a USB port) there are two PIC microcontrollers, one handles the RA axis and the other the DEC. The TTL serial connection on the D type connector has two pins for TX and RX, which go to the TX and RX pins on each of the two PIC micros. Blocking diodes are used as the ports on each PIC are connected to the same pin. The fact that you get a response from one of those PICs would suggest that the physical connection between the D type connector and the UART of one PIC is fine as it reports back a response from one axis. This would suggest that either one of the blocking diodes has failed, or the UART (serial port) on the PIC that controls the failed axis that doesn't respond has been blown. There is 12v on adjacent pins (as per the diagram below) that will blow the UART of the pic as that is running at 5v TTL levels I've managed to fix a few blown board by replacing the damaged PICs with new ones that have been programmed with the relevant firmware as documented in this thread - . If you can't see anything obvious then drop me a PM and we can try and see if we can effect a similar repair on your board

Are you confirming the use of daylight saving, and entering the date in the correct format. It's been ages since I used an handset but remember it needed to be MMDDYYYY. Also polar alignment is an essential part of setting up an equatorial mount and not a requirement of an ALT/AZ mount. If there is a physical fault with the mount that would need addressing, if it sounds like gear stripping

Like Noodles, I can't offer you or your friend with any real assistance, but I would approach the admin staff at The Royal Greenwich Observatory in London. Established in 1675 it would cover a lot of astronomical events of the time both in the UK and with other observatories around Europe. If they can't directly help they may be able to direct you towards other sources.

One trick I learnt from the days where we didn't have cheap astro cameras let alone modern smart phones is to bracket exposures. For example with a film based SLR camera I would start at a point I had an educated guess at, say for a bright object, 5 seconds, then increase exposure by 5 seconds through to say 40 seconds. Granted you ended up with a lot of wasted film to start with, but after a while you soon get a feel for what is a good starting point and end point as you get to understand the capabilities of the equipment (A Vixen 4" refractor) and could reduce the number of bracketed exposures to a point where it only needed 3 or 4 images. These days with digital cameras and modern software things are a lot easier as less costly

You need to give us details of the equipment used, both telescope and camera so we can advise what you were doing wrong

The mount can be connected to a USB2 port. There is not a lot of traffic between it and the computer. Guide camera's typically have less resolution than main cameras, but they are typically sending short exposures of around 1-2sec, so USB3 would be more suited. Likewise with the main camera as whilst the exposure may be longer, the resulting data send to the computer will make use of the greater bandwidth.

As others have mentioned, USB3 has a faster data transfer rate, on paper around 10x faster (USB2 is around 480Mbps, USB3 is quoted at 4,800Mbps). If a modern camera has a USB3 port plugging it in to a USB2 port could create a bottleneck (best analogy I can think of is when lanes get closed on a motorway and the traffic bunches up but continues to move through the obstruction at a reduce speed). As David has said, just look at getting a USB3 cable of suitable length and use USB 3 port on the computer.

To be honest it's wise to invest in the tools for the task. A cheshire or Hotech collimator and a self centring adapter makes the task of collimation a lot easier. Rather than using the moon, do a star test. Find a bright star, then rack the focus to both extremes and look for the pattern of detraction rings that form. If they are concentric like the image below then the scope is collimated

My guess is that as the firmware is uploaded via a serial connection then a bootloader is used in both 16F886 and STM32 versions of the board. Again, you are more experienced than I, but I always thought bootloaders were placed in restricted memory in the stack, so that the normal code doesn't overwrite it and thus brick the device?? It sounds like these new boards have the prolific 230X chipset to handle the TTL serial to USB coms... If the board has a 28pin 2303HX chip, pins 1 and 5 are the TTL RX/TX lines. So if they were shorted then in theory sending any ASCII character via a terminal program it should echo back. If it does then I would try removing the short and send :e1 to see if the Arm chip returns the firmware version... If it doesn't then that would suggest that the chip has a bricked firmware, or something else fried it.

You're more experienced than I as I've never programmed an STM32 before. I was looking on the board for a JTAG header which would save having to physically remove the chip, presuming that it is the chip that has been damaged. I have a feeling that the board still uses a USB/Serial chip to handle the coms between the hand controller and the processor. It could be that chip (prolific chip) that has gone tits up and causing the error. Looking at the sw website the firmware for your mount should be Firmware: Universal Stepper Motor Driver with Built-in USB port, Version 3.23 if I'm not mistaken, I presume that was the version you were trying to upload? - I would have thought that if you had tried to upload the older firmware for the 16F886's found in mounts without USB ports to a board with an ARM processor on it the windows loader would have reported a problem. Either way, seeing that the software can no longer find the board, re-uploading the correct firmware isn't an option. My attention was drawn to that port to, assuming D is for data, and C for common - with G for ground and + for programming voltage ??? Is there anything on the underside of the board - maybe pads on the board rather than a header ? If you can find the USB to Serial chip (presuming this isn't built into the ARM chip) then shorting the TXandRX pins and using a terminal program you should be able to confirm that the coms are working as it will echo back whatever you send via the com port. If you do manage to find an ICSP pad or header and reprogram the chip with the firmware (which might need converting to HEX) then keep us posted. It would be great to then merge this thread with the one I linked to for future reference

Can you post up a picture of the faulty motor board

From my limited experience repairing motor boards it is very rare to brick a mount simply by uploading a firmware file as the micro controllers have a boot loader in a dedicate part of memory that doesn't get over written when using the windows application. Most of the boards I've repaired have been boards based around the older 16F886 PIC micro controllers, and have been damaged when the user incorrectly used the wrong type of serial to USB convertor or plugged the connection cable into the handset connector by mistake. This shouldn't be the case with your mount as it uses a straight bog standard USB cable. The "No response both axis" message displayed in the handset is caused by the handset not receiving a reply to the command to enquire what motor board its connected to. This could be due to any brake in the communications line, dirty connectors, damaged curly cable, blown convertor chip in the mount, etc etc. The handset sends out "please identify yourself" command to the board and expects to get back "EQ6 R" in a timely response. Now if your motor board is based on 16F886's then it's repairable by reprogramming two new PICs with the mount firmware (needs converting first) - Have a read of this lengthy post where we've documented the repair process. However if your board is one of the newer (which I strongly suspect it is ) motor boards with an ARM processor then sadly that is beyond my level of expertise, and will need either a new board purchased form the UK importer (either directly or via the retailer the mount was purchased), or we need to locate someone with the tools and equipment and skills to reprogram and replace ARM cortex processors.