Homemade tracking mount for a Dslr

[F137CHA]

decided that setting up my heq5 every time for some wide field photography with an dslr was taking to long. I have now repurposeed an old EQ1 and turn it into a quick and simple tracking mount.

Now I know I could just buy the tracking motor and be done with it but I wanted a bit of a challenge, so I decided to do all the electronics and drive hardware. With the intention of building my own mount from scratch eventually.

so my prototype is now complette using stuff I had laying around from other projects that I no longer have a use for. I'm am using an Arduino for all of the control, a nema17 200 step stepper motor, an L293D h-bridge for the stepper driver and a 40:1 gearbox I found on eBay for £3.

So it's now all setup and all my calculations are done so now all I need is a clear night so I can test it properly.

[happy-kat]

Nice :-)

Light weight I guess and now with reliable accurate motor.

[themos]

One thing you will probably need is a way to counter the > 100 arc-second periodic error in that worm gear. We did a modification of the hand controller for the motor you can buy for the EQ1 so that you could "press" the fast-forward and stop buttons by electronic signals. We also wrote an ASCOM driver that supported the few PulseGuiding commands you need. You should be able to do something similar since you already have the Arduino there that can plug in to a USB port. Of course, you'd need to mount a guiding camera onto the EQ1 as well as your DSLR. But it can work, see here

[F137CHA]

Thanks for the input, I tried to do a simular thing to you with my old eq5.

This is only a trail to see if I can do it before I go ahead and build my own mount. I will get the circuit made up properly on a bit of veroboard so I can bring it along to the next meeting.

[themos]

Ok! I suppose an alternative would be to work the irregularities by "lapping" the gears.