Gina

Connected other stuff and everything appeared in Ekos as before. I shall need something to point the telescope at to capture a sensible image. If we get any reasonably clear weather tomorrow I can put the rig on the NEQ6 mount and point the scope out of the east facing window. Then I can try focussing on the usual tree on the far hill that I use from the observatory.

Put fuses in the fuse-holders and connected the unit to 13.8v from bench PSU. Firstly, just focuser motor connected, not camera, EFW or mount. Ekos showed Astroberry Focuser and Board as expected. Set focus "Ticks" to a few thousand and watched for motor rotation - rotated fairly fast in one direction. Set back to zero and rotated in the other direction. So the focuser is working fine

One thing I didn't mention before - there is provision for dew heater control should it be wanted. This runs off the Astroberry Board driver which connects to a GPIO pin with a resistor driving an NPN transistor and P-channel power MOSFET and connector (3 pin on the right). The MOSFET is the black TO220 cased component in the middle of the HAT. Dew heater power is derived from the 13.8v supply (switched by the MOSFET) and has common Gnd. The Astroberry Board driver only provides ON/OFF control rather than PWM. Here's a zoom in on one of the photos above

Lid printed and put on box. Here's a rather poor photo of the full rig - I'll take better one later... Maybe I'll put it on the NEQ6 mount Not that I can test it much. Maybe tomorrow I can point it out the window if the rain stops!

Base printed and glued to box. Inserted and wired up all the components (I think). Designed and now printing the lid. Here are some photos of the electronics box with stepper motor attached to dovetail bar.

Now printing a base plate to attach the box to the dovetail bar and allow spacing for the screws that attach the RPi and HAT to the box. This will be solvent welded to the bottom of the box. Decided to mount RPi with three screws and opened up the curly corner hole to allow attaching HAT to RPi but not to box. Three supports are quite adequate for the RPi/HAT combination and saves another nearly 2 hours of box printing. For anyone using PLA rather than ABS, the box and base plate could be printed as one item, using support material.

Hmm... found when fitting the RPi that there's slight curl in the corner and the RPi raised mounting point is slightly too high and would cause the RPi to bend so a slight design change and reprint indicated I think. I guess I could use just three rather than four RPi mounting points.

Bits fit in alright so I should be able to get them all installed tomorrow

Good luck with you ASC Mike

Initial box design. Power connector on front in 16mm hole. Connectors to RPi in slot and fuses on front with wiring lugs through holes. Smoothing and RFI suppression capacitors in space to the left. Slot on left for motor cable and hole on right for camera power cable. Lid will be separate and clip onto top of box.

Made a start Now designing the box.

I think I can strip the parts out of the current power and focus unit as I can't see any chance of doing any more imaging with it and the Win7 laptop. The weather looks set wet for the whole week and the laptop is decidedly dodgy and hardly worth bothering with.

After quite a heavy day yesterday, I'm feeling tired today and it's taking me a while to get going. The weather doesn't help either - persistent fine rain landing on my picture window in the living room plus poor visibility is not giving me any incentive to do anything! A plus point though - the Baader Delrin spacers have arrived and I've added a 0.6mm one to the two T2 extension tubes and M48-T2 adapter. Gets the spacing right and helps stop the parts cold welding together.

To avoid the dreaded "sticky out" plug for the power I'm going to adopt tekkydave's idea of soldering the power wires to the test points on the bottom side of the RPi.

I guess I could publish the latest backup file - need to change the password back to default first though and I'd compress it with zip or whatever. To go with the software tutorial I think I'll include making the focuser control and modifying the little 28BYJ-48 stepper motor from unipolar to bipolar connection. But I think that might be more appropriate for the "DIY Astronomer" forum. They don't have to be together - links from one to the other would suffice. I do think they both could do with separating from my personal projects though.

Thanks Wim

Thinking about the best place to post a tutorial thread about setting up the RPi software. Ah yes, the last word said it - Software Forum. Obvious really Not sure if I'll start it tonight though

I don't think so - rain forecast In fact rain forecast for the whole week Guess it gives me plenty of time to make up the electronics though In fact I think I'll do separate electronics boxes for the scope rig and the rotating camera lens rig.

PHEW!! I've done it Now I need a short rest - cuppa I think

Finally the Astroberry Board driver test - fine $ indiserver -m 100 -vv indi_asi_ccd indi_asi_wheel indi_eqmod_telescope indi_rpifocus indi_rpibrd

Have they now!!! Well well Backup completed

Quick - quick - backup!!

YESSSS!!!! It's worked - Yippee

No errors. pi@raspberrypi:/ $ cd ~/ pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ls astroberry-svn bcm2835-1.50 bcm2835-1.50.tar.gz indi-astroberry libindi_1.3.1_rpi libindi_1.3.1_rpi.tar.gz SSH pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd indi-astroberry pi@raspberrypi:~/indi-astroberry $ make -- Found INDI: /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libindi.so -- Configuring done -- Generating done -- Build files have been written to: /home/pi/indi-astroberry [ 37%] Built target indi_rpifocus Scanning dependencies of target indi_rpibrd [ 37%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/indi_rpibrd.dir/rpi_brd.o [ 37%] Linking CXX executable indi_rpibrd [ 37%] Built target indi_rpibrd pi@raspberrypi:~/indi-astroberry $ sudo make install [ 50%] Built target indi_rpifocus [100%] Built target indi_rpibrd Install the project... -- Install configuration: "" -- Installing: /usr/bin/indi_rpibrd -- Installing: /usr/share/indi/indi_rpibrd.xml -- Installing: /usr/bin/indi_rpifocus -- Installing: /usr/share/indi/indi_rpifocus.xml pi@raspberrypi:~/indi-astroberry $

make worked. Now to try sudo make install