3d printed mount - Does anybody knows about it?

[Gorr_77]

Amazing!!

OpenAstro tracker  - you can buy a kit from this guy:

The price 120 Euro includes:

• Arduino Uno + 16×2 LCD shield
• 2x 28BYJ steppers + driver boards
• 7 bearings
• Screws and nuts
• bubble level
• timing belt
• Material cost for over 30 printed parts, with 50 hour print time
• packaging
• sales tax

 

This is great step forward in Amateur Astro  - home made 3d printing machine run on Arduino - and he built himself this:!!!?

One day it will be so easy to print anything you like!!  Friction mount? - no problem....few hr later MESU mk17 ....and ready to go

 

[Mognet]

There was a bit of a discussion of it on here a few months ago https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/346858-3d-printed-tracker/

I haven't heard if anyone has made their own yet, so maybe I should order up some parts and get printing during the summer lull

[skybadger]

Well his website says you can, but I have signed up twice and had no feedback... 

[Gorr_77]

3 hours ago, skybadger said:

Well his website says you can, but I have signed up twice and had no feedback... 

..hmmmmm... i did send him an email as well.. without a response... but  i've found someone who actually got it....

... looks quality:)

 

[Gorr_77]

3 hours ago, skybadger said:

Well his website says you can, but I have signed up twice and had no feedback... 

..hmmmmm... i did send him an email as well.. without a response... but  i've found someone who actually got it....

... looks quality:)

 

I am wrong:

Actually those pictures are not from the buyer but from the designer , ....

 

[intercipere]

Hey there, i'm still on this and i'm still working on selling the kit. However, its very hard for me currently to source larger quantities of the parts needed, especially the filament (the 3D printing raw material). At least here in Germany practically every manufacturer, as well as my usual supplier, are constantly out of stock and i dont want to resort to the cheaper china filament thats available. So i'm using that time to further iterate the design, and theres been quite a few changes. The pictures posted are a bit outdated already.

I've made numerous little improvements here and there, but most notably are the camera mount and the base thats been replaced with aluminum extrusions. For the camera it has improved stability quite a bit, especially for the guider thats held by two clamps now. The aluminum base has made the whole assembly SO much more steady and less wobbly that i'm quite mad i hadnt done that way earlier.

Note that the motors in the pictures arent the ones that i'm going to include in the kit because theyre a good bit more expensive, but i might make them an extra option if testing finds them worth the increased price. 

Theres also a LOT of improvements on the software front, although for that i cant claim credit. Some amazing people from the community have taken pity on my horrible code and really improved things. The local LCD plus buttons now has nice new features like manual movement over the buttons, slew home, drift alignment (aswell as the standard Polaris alignment method), POI and coordinate goto, several calibration options and some more. Additionally theres now a proper ASCOM driver with pulseguide, slewTo/syncTo, home, park and manual movement capabilities. As if thats not enough, theres also a android and windows application in the works that will allow wireless control over wifi or bluetooth. 

Sadly, summer has arrived up here in the north and "night" is practically non existent until august, so i cant get much astrophotography done. I did get two images recently that i like:

A really unspectacular image of the Owl Nebula and M108 at 200mm, with about 50x 180s exposures

and the Heart & Soul Nebula at 200mm, with 70x 120s exposures (excuse the horrible CA)

I'm not sending out mails to subscribers cause theres quite a lot of them and i dont want to spam so many people. There is going to be one mail once i start selling (whenever that will be haha). The subscription was really just for me to see if theres even enough people interested.

And sorry Gorr if i missed your mail

[Gorr_77]

Thank for that  

It sounds very promising 

I am sure that many people will follow

[skybadger]

Thanks for the update. While I understand the stocking issues there are as many problems pre-announcing too early that are only solved by good comms!

Eagerly looking forward to this. Can you remind us of the website please to take part in development ?

[intercipere]

Hmm youre right, maybe an update here and there isnt a bad idea. Maybe i'll make a small blog section or a newsletter where i tell people about how things are proceeding. 

What website do you mean? Most of the develepment happens on Github in the "develop" branch: https://github.com/OpenAstroTech/OpenAstroTracker

[skybadger]

Right. Tracking that now. Ta.