LuckieEddie

Cut and fitted replacement floorboards around the pier. Fitted the weather station to the roof. This consists of an Anemometer, a BME280 module for temperature, pressure and humidity, and separately a MLX90614 infrared thermometer module for cloud sensing. There's also provision for connecting a Hydreon RG-15 rain sensor at a later date.

Alan - I just sent you my recommended shopping list for the OnStep conversion - it came to about £102 ex delivery, and not including the Smart Hand Controller. Enjoy. 😀

A fair bit of progress in the last month... I've finished the pier, smoothed and painted a light grey. The adaptor plate and mount adaptor have been fitted. After we got back from a couple of weeks away I found that the plywood support for the squome had slightly sagged in-between the castors - only 1-2mm but enough to effect the rotation. To counteract this I had to do two things. The first was increase the gap between this plywood support and the roof upright splash guard ring. This was originally set by planning the top of the ring but to do that again I would have to take apart and remove the whole door/squome assembly, so instead I shimmed the castors up by 3mm with some steel plates. Secondly I've added an additional twelve 50mm castors spaced in-between the main bearing six 75mm castors to better spread the load and reduce the tendency to sag. Talking of sagging, I also noticed that the plastic door cladding was drooping a bit at the centre of the door span so I added a centre bracing length of extrusion. After this I've insulated the doors with 40mm Celetex style insulation board glued to the plastic. This finishes flush with the support frame extrusion. Next I've got the drag chain support tray fitted. The cables have been fed through the drag chain and connected to the rotating puller arm. I tried a manual rotation with this in place and found a problem. When pulling the drag chain all is okay, but pushing it back the other way causes it to fold up in s-bends and jam up. Obvious with hindsight. I think I've come up with a possible solution but this needs making and testing.

A Pi4 idles at around 3W and has a max TDP of 10W. Stellarmate is not demanding in terms of computation unless you do things like have the fits viewer debayering turned on and are pushing high resolution relatively short exposure images at it, even then it won't be that bad. Typical use I would guess under 5W. The specified PSU capacity is about avoiding drop outs under short duration peaks and allowing for powering USB connected devices.

I had a minor issue this evening that with hindsight was a good thing. While testing the manual rotation control I slipped with the multimeter probes causing a temporary short. This blew the protective fuse on my OCS4 controller. While hunting for my box of fuses it occurred to me that the manual control 12V supply should not be connected to the fused OCS4 12V. This means I need to add an additional fuse in the control panel and wire it direct to the PSU. Lucky I found it now during testing rather than later on when in operation. Even with no faults I would have been overloading the current fuse slightly so it would have blown at some point.

Today I peeled the pier (removed the cardboard tube former) and also removed the wooden support frame. Quiet a few 'bug holes' but nothing too large, at most maybe 5mm deep. While the surface was still damp I gave it a 'bag rub with mortar. A reasonable start but more finishing definitely needed. After that I've started positioning and wiring up the power supplies (12V for the doors and squome, 24V for the mount) and control system. I'm using an OCS4 as the controller, an open source project by Howard Dutton, the author of OnStep. I've also made a manual control panel for overriding the system if anything goes wrong. All cases were 3D printed.

Surprisingly it only took about 4 hours but this morning my back is reminding me that it wasn't a gentle 4 hours.

Yeah, I know. I meant 12 noon UTC. I've only eyeballed it though so it won't be that accurate. I do have +/- 1deg adjustment possible on the adaptor plate and my mount has about +/- 10deg so I don't think it'll be a problem.

Pier concreting day. Here's the prepared workspace. Pile cage mounting on a wood surround. I've used ⌀68mm drainpipe for the cable conduit up the centre, held in place with galvanised wire for concreting. I've strapped two spirit levels to the pile cage so I can keep an eye on the level and tweak as I pour. Concrete just below the tube mount level. Removed the pile cage support ready to install the tube former. Tube former installed, spirit levels remounted on the tube, and tube base temporarily back filled to help hold in place. Looking down the tube former ready to start bucketing concrete in the top. Pouring finished, studs for fixing the the pier adaptor are held in position by a pair of wooden alignment boards, which also centred up on the sides of the tube and had a North alignment marked to match up with the line I'd previously drawn up the wall from a 12 noon shadow. Thanks and hugs to Debbie for helping with the concrete spade work, filling buckets while I lugged them up the ladder, and keeping me hydrated.

The cardboard tube concrete former for the pier was delivered yesterday, and I collected the rebar pile cage today (thanks again to Nick, this time with his trailer). Tube is ⌀300mm internal diameter x 2m long, and the pile cage is ⌀200mm diameter x 3m long. The tube may need trimming down a bit - I'll find out when I do a test fit.

After I made some fine adjustments to the wiring of the roof sequencer, ie. using the correct connector positions (RTFM Ed, don't assume), we have lift off! First opening/closing sequence... VID_20240812_182110774.mp4 It's about 45 seconds for both doors to open or close. A bit noisier than I was hoping/expecting but there's no insulation in the doors yet which should dampen it down a bit.

Yep, I thought of that one. On the lowest edge I've drilled drain holes through the wrap over end pieces and sealed the joint internally with silicone. We had a little bit of rain this week and it seemed to drain okay. Typical isn't it, when the roof was off, and then done but with the hole it never stopped bucketing it down. Since I've put on the 'dome' (which I'm now informed by the wife should be called a squome [for square dome]) it's only lightly sprinkled once!

Thanks Alan. Door motorisation coming soon. I'll be happy to show round once it's a bit more finished.

Today I've trimmed the plastic cladding flush so that the aluminium frame of the doors sits flat on the aluminium frame of the base. I've also fitted a rubber seal in the upward facing extrusion on the hinge side with a flat plastic mating insert in the facing door extrusion. Then along the sides where the doors close I've fitted a raised V-section that acts as an alignment as the doors close and also a water break. This was a piece that I designed and 3D printed. Now onto the door motors...

Yep, there's an upright section of the lining ring that was fibre-glassed along with the rest of the roof that overlaps about 30mm with the 'dome' base cladding, and the edge of the cladding is also raised 20mm from the roof. So unless the rain can splash vertically more than a couple of inches underneath the overhang of the base I should hopefully stay dry. 🤞 You can see the ring in the photo I posted earlier in the thread on the 19th July.