openDrive <-> Ethersex <-> SkySafari

[rmike]

Hi,

here's a small video of our openDrive project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWyo-2PWCHA

That's just a demo with hard coded motor and mount parameters etc.

openDrive is a open source / open hardware project for a scalable, freely available telescope drive system for equatorial and alt-azimuth mounts.

The modular design is based on stackable PCBs. See here for details: https://github.com/selste/openDrive/wiki/Hardware

Some facts about our current stepper motor driver board:

- capable of delivering 2.5Aeff/coil (=5Amax/motor)

- 64 microstep resolution

- up to 30V operation (it's spinning up to 20rps with a Escap P530 in the above video with 24V)

- based on TMC428/429 and TMC249 from Trinamic

CPU board:

There will be a cpu board based on ATmega1284p and the great ethersex project (https://github.com/ethersex/ethersex and www.ethersex.de). And an optional linux add on, probably based on the raspi (raspberrypi.org) for more complex things like pointing models, large catalogs, webcam based auto guiding etc.

Maybe some of you folks like to join the development?

Regards,

Michael