platesolver_com

7 hours ago, malc-c said:

Can you elaborate - you seem to have miss quoted me !!

I was under the impression you replaced a faulty HEQ5 board with one of the new versions.  I don't follow that last sentence regarding INDI

not me, the person above who I quoted, all I shared was the USB port on the new boards, then both sides of the old boards, how did I misquote you? im sure if you read again it will become clear

On 29/10/2021 at 13:31, malc-c said:

Sorry, no, the board that came with the mount as I brought it last year, that said I have now seen the pair of PIC's on the other side of the old boards, that said I have Indi inside the HEQ5 now without any external cables other than power just need to get Alpaca working now.

On 15/09/2020 at 15:08, TinyGravitas said:

So, first up, a TL;DR: I bought a new mainboard for my HEQ5 Pro after it blew. And the board that arrived doesn't look ANYTHING like any other board I've seen for the HEQ5 Pro.

Now the long version. 

In the early part of the week I was running some tests with some new equipment and everything was going great. Right up until the point where I was slewing to M31 and suddenly everything connected to my laptop disconnected for a few moments. My camera came back up, but the mount did not. After some investigation with swapping from my EQDIRECT lead to the handset and back a few times it seemed to be terminal. I disassembled my head and pulled out my mainboard, I then ran through with some advice about changing the two 470uF caps on there which I did and still nothing. So it's proper fried. I discovered the culprit in the end. I had a series of flying leads on the new power supply I bought and it turns out the positive centre of the 12V connectors sit slightly proud so I'm theorising that it touched with the legs of the telescope or with the negative of one of the flying leads and caused a short that blew the board.

So I decided to order a new mainboard:

https://www.microglobe.co.uk/sky-watcher-motherboard-for-heq5-pro-p-15281.html

Whilst that was coming I built myself a little power distrubution box to avoid this happening in future, something would have to go REALLY wrong for something to make a bad connection now.

And so today the board arrived. Except it's not like any other HEQ Pro board I've ever seen. And it's nothing like the picture on their website. I also can't find the board anywhere online.

So here below you can see the old Synscan Rev2 board I blew up and took out, ignore the two poorly soldered Caps in the bottom right.

And here you can see the new board that was shipped to me today.

 

The weird thing is that everything that should be there, is there. They have swapped out the controllers and moved a lot of the components from the back to the front, but there appears to be everything here, plus some extra? They have swapped the PIC micros out for that ARM up at the top, and it's all a little bizare. 

No matter how much I search for this board I can't find any details on it and I'm wondering if it's some kind of knockoff?

Anyway, I don't have much to lose by trying it out. I doubt it could do much damage to my steppers or my hookup board so really it only risks blowing itself. 

So I'll plug it in later and see what I get? 

I'll be sure to make sure that the hand controller portion of it is only putting out 12v and only down the correct pins, but who knows? 

At least the board is more compact.



 

So you know J5 is a fully working USB Port, it just works with ASCOM @115200 baud


i've done it so 100% working