How do you fit assorted electronics boxes on the mount?

[old_eyes]

I have an ADM side by side bar for dual mounting a camera lens plus CMOS colour camera for widefields and an Equinox ED80 with a mono CCD and filter wheel (soon to be upgraded to a 120). This one:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adm-losmandy-type-d-series/adm-losmandy-style-dual-mounting-bar.html

I have various bits and pieces that I would like to mount between the two telescopes - project box containing switched 12V outlets, USB hub, focus controller and dew heater controller. It keeps them out of the way and closer to the mount axis of rotation.

On my previous mount I used a Geoptik Vixen side by side bar. This was a solid slab and it was fairly easy to used heavy duty Velcro to fix anything I wanted  to the bar. The ADM bar has areas machined away (to reduce weight presumably). but this only leaves thin bars unsuitable for my regular 50mm wide Velcro.

What does everyone else use to fix electronic boxes at the mount? I could have some bolt holes drilled and tapped, but I wondered if I was making things unnecessarily complicated?

Edited April 2, 2021 by old_eyes

[AMcD]

I mount my electronics on a home made plate mounted on top of the scope rings.  It is getting a little crowded now and I am in the process of designing and building a remotely controlled Bahtinov mask and scope cover.  The electronics box for that and the stepper motors will have to hang off the side like the current TEC box for my QHY8 😁

[old_eyes]

That looks good. I see you have enough height on the guidescope to slip the boxes underneath. I reckon I could do that even with my engineering skills!

I would still want to put the 12V power switch box on the side-by-side bar, but now it wouldn't have a load of other stuff on top of it and would be much lighter and easier to fix down.

[AMcD]

It was pretty straightforward to put together - and needed to be as my engineering skills extend largely to drilling holes in things 😂

[John78]

On 10/04/2021 at 13:42, AMcD said:

I mount my electronics on a home made plate mounted on top of the scope rings.  It is getting a little crowded now and I am in the process of designing and building a remotely controlled Bahtinov mask and scope cover.  The electronics box for that and the stepper motors will have to hang off the side like the current TEC box for my QHY8 😁

I'll bite, why do you need a remote bhat, if you already have a remote/motorised focuser?  The autofocus routines via various free software is amazingly good these days - I was considering an automatic flat/scope cover, but its not entirely clear how to implement it on the front of a refractor without it being a wind sock or having 270 degrees of  motion.

[AMcD]

10 hours ago, John78 said:

I'll bite, why do you need a remote bhat, if you already have a remote/motorised focuser?  The autofocus routines via various free software is amazingly good these days - I was considering an automatic flat/scope cover, but its not entirely clear how to implement it on the front of a refractor without it being a wind sock or having 270 degrees of  motion.

The autofocus routines are great - when they work.  However, given how rare it is to get a clear night with good seeing I want to able to fall back on a reliable remote focusing method if the autofocus software decides that it is not going to behave on that evening, rather than waste time fixing with the software.  The project is really designed to mitigate what I find to be the inconsistent reliability of focusing software.  You can see my plan for implementing both a remote Bahtinov mask and a scope cover/flat on a refractor at:

I do not tend to have issues with the wind due to scope being in an observatory and the observatory being in a very protected location.

[John78]

Yeah one of the reasons I'm attempting to move from Windows to a Rpi is EKOS keeps my QSI583 connected properly 100% of the time, sometimes windows/ascom totally loses the plot - I cannot control the camera, but the filter wheel still work fine through the same USB port, which forces me to reboot and then I lose the pointing model, guiding cals, tracking etc....  So understand mitigating software frustrations.

One thing I've never tried is the autofocus using bahtinov option, the HFR options I use are a bit slow I need to do the average of 3 subs at 5 to 7 focus points for it to reliably find best focus - it looks like I could test that tonight as its too moony for real imaging.  I presume it models the diffraction lines and moves them to dead centre.

[chemistorge]

Simply: heavy duty Velcro.