Mods to my dob plus DIY digital push to conversion

[Kusanagi]

Its a while since I last posted about my dob and have made a few mods to it.

First up was a mod to the feet, on use I had noticed that the dob had a habit of moving out of place when turning on azimuth, and I also had no way of levelling the dob base for use with turning circles so I decided to make a set of adjustable tripod feet to make it more steady and easily adjustable to make level.

 

Next up was to make and install a DIY digital turning circle set up for use with Skysafari which I had seen done on another forum. https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/589521-37-dobsonian-dsc-for-diy-makers/.

This setup is based around a Node mcu ESP8266 arduino unit with a 600 p/r optical encoder (  geared to give higher resolution ) on azimuth and a 303 magnetometer on altitude.

I have now got this setup installed and working on my dob ( after much brain scratching and then realizing I had not set the correct upload rate to the arduino unit ) but have not yet used it on a viewing yet but have played with it indoors and it looks very promising.