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Teaser pics of where I am right now with LB16 mods

calibos

By calibos
in Members Equipment Gallery

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calibos

calibos

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As per thread title. Half way through base mods, haven't finished all the wiring there never mind started anything on the OTA which will be all gloss black too.

Keep in mind the thing is filthy with finger prints while I work on it and will be polished and waxed when finished. Keep in mind that the camera flash highlights every little dust spec and blemish. Keep in mind its only 1/4 done. Keep in mind that house is being renovated soon so don't react with shock at the paint overspray on the dining room/workshop floor. Also keep in mind that I am aware a lynching would insue if all those lights were on at a starparty. :cool: They are just a bit of fun, a talking point and in keeping with the scope theme The lights will only ever be on for streetlight lit sidewalk astronomy events or as disco lights for Clouded out SGL5 party nights :)

Anyway, some teaser pics from 1/4 way through project.

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calibos

calibos

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small animated GIF

This is the LED bar in 'Knightrider' mode. It actually can flash in all sorts of sequences and every colour of the rainbow. It even has a 'beat' mode with a built in microphone so it can flash and pulse in time with a music beat. Its blumming amazing to look at. So like I said, if I ever make it over the water to an SGL and we get clouded out. Just call on DJ CALIBOS to provide the outdoor astro Disco music and Disco Lights to make those cloudy sky blues go away!! It'll be bed no earlier than 4am whether its clear or not with me on the scope decks :cool::)

[EDIT] Larger link in a post below

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calibos

calibos

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Yeah, I thought I better put some pics up even though I am not nearly finished as its taking longer than I expected and I have been talking it up and teasing for so long that I am sure some people were starting to think my middle name was 'Mitty' :cool:

Stuff still to do: (ie Most of it :) )

Wire everything up properly. I just hooked up a small 12v battery pack to the lights already installed in position to get an idea of what they'll look like. Exceeded my expectations tbh.

Everything will ultimately be wired through my Dewbuster Dew controller which as well as being the best Dew controller on the market also acts as my power distribution block for the battery with its 4x 12v power outlets and a 3v outlet to permanently power the UTA mounted GLP. The Dewbuster also acts as a battery protector as it cuts power once its senses the batteries voltage dropping to dangerous levels, ie 11v @ below about 30% charge for a Gel Cel battery. The onboard battery on the scope in one of the side compartments is a 26AH.

Everything has an LED dip switch as seen beside the Dewbuster. The main scope on/off dip switch and the 4 12v and 3v outlet dip switch LEDS will remain lit when they are on. However it was cool when Ron Keating of Dewbuster pointed out a happy consequence of running the 7x heater outputs through the LED dipswitches too. Because the Dewbuster uses PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to send power to the DewNot Dewstrips, this means that all the dip switch LEDS corresponding to a heater strip will pulse in rythm and in waves. Should look cool! :)

As you can see the Dewbuster RCA jacks seem permanently wired through the base. This is because they are. However they are not permenently wired to a dew strip. Instead they are permently wired either to their base mounted 12v device or the heater strip and 3v GLP power to a base mounted RCA connection panel. There is a corresponding panel to be mounted on the UTA where the UTA heaters(Temp sensor controlled secondary heater, moonlite filterslide heater, EP heater, GLP heater, Stellarvue 80mm RACI finder Objective and eyepiece heater) will be permanently wired. ie Dewbuster stays permanently mounted to base, Heaters stay permanently mounted at their respective locations and for set up and break down I will have one neat heatshrink wrapped cable bundle that connects to the RCA panels on each the UTA end and BAse end. ie. everything hooks up in seconds. I assemble the scope and simply plug in the 6 jacks on each end of the cable bundle to the RCA panel and I am almost ready to go.

The only other additional set up step over a bare bones lightbridge before collimation is to attach two other things to the base. See to the right of the side support there are two threaded inserts. My laptop stand pole quickly attaches here with 2 knobs. Laptop articulating arm goes onto pole and then on top of the hole I have a moonlite ball and socket truss joint. My red LED lit heated EP box sits here and can be tilted and rotated on the ball and socket. The eyepieces sit in a metal rack that is heated by 2x 2" Dewnot strips. Its easier to keep dew off than to clear it after it forms. Hence the heated EP box even though I have actual EP heater strips at the focuser.

The other additional setup item is a gooseneck (ie bendy MIC stand) that screws onto a mounting plate that'll be fitted to the base. I am taking out all the electronics and buttons from My Orion Intelliscope DSC handset, Rigel Motor Focus handset and TNT motor hanset and mounting them all in a gloss black unified controller housing handset that I am fabricating from a Fererro Roche box :o The intelliscope buttons are backlit anyway, but I have an idea on how to backlight the other controllers buttons. So this unified handset will be on the end of the gooseneck stalk. I'll be able to position the handset within arms reach no matter where the scope is pointed. ie. no more tripping over cables and standing on handsets after I put one down so that I can pick up and use the other one etc.

I have yet to fit the KNightrider and Lightbridge Blue metallic decals to the base and have yet to fit the spot lights that will highlight the decals. But my Wheelbarrow wheels are done as you can see. Will take up little to no space in the car. The Wheel chuck is very compact as you can see as it is not one piece with the handles which are separate. After moving the scope into position, I remove the wheel chuck and put it where the handle bars are, and the handle bars fit onto the back of the Lower tube assemble via some chrome towel rail holders I sprayed the same metallic blue. The handle bars have mounted inside the ends, solid Iron bars that came from a weighted skipping rope as did the foam handlebar grips. The handlebars now become additional counterweight that I'll need to balance all the stuff on the UTA. ie The wheel chuck and handle bars get fitted back onto the scope and perform a function even when not in use and they are up off the muck not getting tripped over.

The endrings and trusses have yet to be painted matt black. the LOTA and UTA have yet to be gloss black vinyl wrapped like the base. I have yet to fit anything to the UTA. Neither the wiring, the heaters, the moonlite filterslide, the Lightshield, the Moonlite motorised focuser. I have yet to insulate from tube induced currents with my posterboard corrugated cardboard and cork sandwich. I have yet to fit the flocking. I have yet to fit my plenum boundary layer push and pull fans, yet to fit counterweights, yet to fit new collimation and locking bolts, yet to baffle rear fan, yet to fit and tweak my 50 pounds Orion Intelliscope DSC

So,so,so much still to do!! :(

I am sure I have forgotten loads!! :brave:

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Doc

Doc

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Having never seen this before it's funny that from all our chats in the past this is exactly how I imagined it.

It's looking really good and I bet when finished will be one hell of a talking point.

can you explain a little more maybe with photo's about your moonlite ball and socket truss joint you mention. I want to do something similar with my laptop.

And finally cannot wait for the unveiling of Knightrider.

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albedo0.39

albedo0.39

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Man Alive !!

Now that is some set up you have going on there ! - Funnily enough, I put a couple of LED style rear lights on my LB the other night so that I could see it in the dark and it set my mind thinking about adding a few "running lights". However, seeing your sequencing LED's a-la-Kitt, made me nervous about trying to compete

Also, like the encioder set up - neat

I'm making an assumption that this is not going to be transported in the back of a car but will remain in your garden ? Having to rip that lot apart would make me wince

Out of interest, what material (and where from) did you use to create the wheelbarrow handles ?

Thanks

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calibos

calibos

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Hi Mick & Steve,

Many thanks for your kind words

Mick,

The laptop stand is a Lindy articulating arm table mount laptop stand that I actually got from a Music equipment store called Thomann. I've actually got a lot of bits and pieces for my astronomy equipment from this 'Music Equipment' website. Like the Gooseneck stand, my EP flightcase, Precubed foam, etc. I'll be getting one of their Mic stand bags for my Truss Poles too for instance. Anyway, back to the Laptop stand. I unscrewed and took off the table clamp part of the stand, had to cut off some of the 8mm thick metal to get it to fit beside my side brace base support and drilled out 2x 9mm holes for my 2x M8 knobbed bolts to go through. These screw into threaded inserts that are screwed into the base. These are like the threaded insert that your altitude brake knob screw into. I got them from a model airplane site :cool: They've biting threads on the outside to grip the fibreboard/cipboard base as you screw them in and the inside circumferance is threaded for M8 bolts.

The pole goes on first in about 10 seconds. Then the articulating arm slides down the pole and this is where the moonlite ball and socket came in. I took off the pole end cap and the ball part of the moonlite ball and socket truss clamp inserted into the end of the tube. The ID of the pole at 35mm was greater than the OD of the ball insert. Those skipping ropes provided parts once again :) The handles of the skipping rope where hollow (for the weights I harvested for my counterweight wheelbarrow handles) As luck would have it the OD of the skipping rope handles matched the ID of the laptop pole and and the ID of the handle matched the OD of the Moonlite ball and socket. In other words the perfect sized spacer to get the ball connector to fit permanently snug and tight in the pole. So the ball and socket isn't for mounting the laptop. Its for easily mounting the heated EP box 'as well as' the laptop arm on the same laptop pole.

Forgot to mention that the wheel chuck and wheelbarrow handles attach to the base via permanently mounted Moonlite 1" OD Truss pole clamps. ie one simply slides the handle/wheel chuck into the clamps and tightens the knobs.

Steve,

Re. the LED running lights. Thank you, thank you for being like minded and not thinking I was making an astronomical cardinal sin!! :) Of course they were OTT probably but from the beginning I had a practical use in mind. Obviously they were for a bit of craic and to tie in with the Knightrider theme with all the colourful lights, but I figured that because I am the last guy to pack up at any dark sky trip I have ever been on. TBH, I'd stay till the sun comes up because my shift work allows me lie ins most days, so its always everyone else that calls it a night before me. Thus although these lights would only ever be on while the scope was being used at brightly lit outreach events, I could in fact also switch them on at the end of an observing session so that I could quickly dismantle the scope and scan the ground in the pitch black without trying to do it with a torch in one hand. No worries about destroying others nightvision when its always me that packs up last anyway! :o

Yeah, the encoder setup is great if I do say so myself :( Especially as I got it for pennies! I really liked the Orion Intelliscope DSC system that I had on my Orion XT12i. I remembered a lightbridge guy or two popping into the Orion Skyquest Yahoo group telling us about harvesting the parts from cheap 6" versions of our Intelliscopes and fitting them to their Lightbridges. Well over on this side of the Pond one couldn't get the 300 dollar 6" version, the smallest over here was the 8" and that made the price too close to a Sky Commander and Argo Navis DSC. The 300 dollar 6" intelliscope was a cheap way for the yanks to get their hands on a Cheap DSC though. But then I heard that Orion were having a end of line sale on their Intelliscope kit for their SVP german equatorial mounts. It turned out these could be adapted with a little modding of the RA and DEC encoder housings and some reconfiguration of the wiring in the handset cable (handset was identical to dob version) to work on a dob!! I got an American buddy from CN forums to order me one from Orion USA on my behalf and forward it on to me in Ireland. It cost 80 dollars in the sale which worked out at 50 euros at the exchange rate at the time. 50 Euros for a DSC and encoders!! Hows that for a bargain!! :brave: They disappeared from the Orion website forever 1 wekk after I got mine! Phew!! :mad:

The Alt encoder has the magnetic encoder disc permanently affixed to the LB16 Alt bearing and the Alt encoder I glued to the handle of a tubaware container which I sprayed gloss black and blue to match the scope colour scheme. The tubaware handle encoder bar slides onto a bolt on each side and is held in place with a cupboard knob on each side. Encoder cables will run through the old ALT brake hole in the base.

As for transport. With my massively streetlit front yard and tiny back yard with views only above 50º at the new house, the scope will in all likelyhood always be transported before use!! I'll be putting myself on every observing group phone contact list in a 50 mile radius :mad: So assuming clear skies I should always have somewhere to bring the scope.

The reason why I went for the LB16 over the GSO16 was that the base height was a few inches shorter. This meant I could fit the base in the back of my Audi TT if you can believe that!! Initially it was a tiny bit of a chore getting it in because although the base forks fit under the roof and back window, there was a bit of a lip in the roof that I had to tilt and manouver the base under. Basically I had to climb into the boot to manhandle it in. But it was only a 1 inch clearance issue we were talking about. So what I did was use those handy threaded inserts again and replaced the base feet with 3 plywood discs with M* bolts through the middle. Now, wheh I go to load the car, I unscrew these 3 feet off. Place the base in the back of the boot, and now it slides up behind the passenger seat with no clearance issues. When I go to take the base out, I just grab a handle, pull it to the back of the boot, screw the 3 feet back on and lift the base out and place it on the ground.

The UTA sits inside the base and the Mirror tub fits at the back of the boot behind/inline with the base. Unbelievably, this means that my LB16 allows a passenger and leaves nearly one third of the boot space free for other gear....like Micks 12"x36" Tent bag!! Ep cases, Wheel Chucks, laptop and stands etc :) Conversely, my old solid tube Orion XT12i took up the entire boot and required the passenger seat to be tilted forwards ruling out carrying a passenger as well as the scope.

I think I covered this in a previous post but the beauty of it is that although there is a lot of extra functionality on that scope, despite the fact that it looks so complicated to set up, what I did was not apply the KISS principle to the initial planning or install (thats uber complicated) but instead have the KISS principle apply for regular use.

All this stuff adds about 2 minutes to the setup time of a standard Lightbridge. ie because of the complicated wiring that I am doing now, it means I get my cake and eat it. Most of the complicated looking stuff is permanently mounted. All I have to do over and above a standard Lightbridge set up is:

Hook up my single cable bundle with its six phono/rca connectors each end, ie. plug them in to Base and UTA connector panels. Now all devices and dewstrips have power - 20 seconds

Screw on my gooseneck stand with unified controller and plug in its 3 cables to base mounted jacks - 30 seconds

Attach laptop pole, put articulating arm on pole, put heated EP box on top of pole, hook up the 2 EP box heater strips to connector panel on base. - 50 seconds

Attach ALT encoder - 15 seconds

Attach TNT ALT Tangent arm to scope bearing - 10 seconds

Connect 5x fan cable from base mounted Fan controller to jack mounted near top rim of Mirror tub - 10 seconds

Done. Doh! thats 2 minutes and 15 seconds :D

All the effort I am putting into OTA insulation, flocking, lightshielding and boundary layer fans is to enable the scopes mirror to deliver the best views it is capable of from the minute I set up without having to wait for hours to cool down. Because I won't be doing half as much observing from home as I used to, I obviously cant be leaving the scope out a few hours before use, and I don't want to waste an hour or two of an observing trip twiddling my thumbs till the scope cools down and starts delivering the views it is capable of. My Orion XT12i really showed me the value of Boundary fans, flocking and light shielding a few weeks ago in the brightly lit front yard with Saturn nearly behind a streetlight. I had fitted a boundary layer scrubbing ring baffle (not practical on the LB16). I was able to take the scope from a heated room, set it up in 5 minutes with the fan running while I set up and 5 minutes after the scope came from that heated room, the scope was delivering crisp high contrast views of Saturn at 428x !!

Anyway, heres a few more pics. Note I have a grubby old laptop holding partial box on the laptop arm plate in one of the pics. I'll be scrapping that and making a new one to fit on the arm that is more aesthetically pleasing and which will have a folding lightshield for the laptop. ie. The screen will have red rubylith over it and the screen will be lightshielded to prevent it bothering others by a folding shroud if you can picture it.

BTW, don't worry about the scope base being unbalanced by the laptop. I have my heavy 26ah battery mounted on the other side of the base which balances all the stuff hanging off the pictured side. The wheel chuck refitted after use to the back wheelbarrow handle clamps balances the gooseneck unified controller hanging off the front. Also because the TNT requires a spacer that takes most of the pressure off the 3 standard teflon pads and puts it all on the lazy susan, I was able to fit 6 replacement 2" teflon pads around the groundboard rim without worrying about excess friction. This means that the base cant tilt on the groundboard even if it was slightly unbalanced and also prevents warping of the lazy susan or indeed screwey Azimuth DSC readings caused by tilt.

As for the poles used for the Wheel Chuck assembly and wheelbarrow handles. Its 1" OD chromed steel pipe with a thickness of about 1 mm as best as I can measure. A old plumber is a regular in our shop and I happened to ask him where one would get 1" OD steel pipe. He said he would be back in a minute. He came back with 2 lengths of Chromed steel pipe that had apparently been sitting in the back of his shed for near 20 years. Turns out it was the perfect OD for the clamps, perfect thickness for strength, perfect chrome finish for painting metallic blue, and exactly the lengths I needed to fabricate the wheel chuck and wheelbarrow handles. How was that for luck!!

Just to be safe but while keeping weight in mind, I got some 1" OD wooden dowel that fitted snuggly inside the tubes. Should the metal tubes start to bend, the dowel inside will prevent the tube kinking to the breaking/tearing point instantaneously. ie I'll have some warning that the tubes were about to give and time to rest the scope back on the ground before the wheel chuck or handle 'gave' catastrophically. TBH though, I don't see that ever happening. The wheel chuck and handle tubes look plenty strong on their own but better safe than sorry!

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calibos

calibos

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Great pimped up scope Calibos,think i will pimp my eq6 tripod up.....................kev

You know what the funny thing is Kev. I think souped up Nissan Micra's with all the flashing lights are the height of tackiness. I can't stand the general car modding scene! Ironic or what!! :cool:

(or course I do make a distinction between the chavs modding their micras and corsa's and the guys doing amazing things to the bodywork and engines of jap imports) I was never a car modder myself though. :)

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calibos

calibos

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Not a huge fan of Punjabi Bhangra myself but it was the only dancey tune with a beat to get the lights going .....that tied in with Knightrider :cool: Was trying to kill two birds with one stone. But ended up just killing one birds eardrums :) (Sorry Ashen :) ) (Especially sorry if you are a bloke and your avatar is a picture of your significant other! So confusing. I was just saying the same thing to the two lads Lulu and Astrobaby) :o:(

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calibos

calibos

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Haha. its funny you should mention cannons. Now obviously all dobs look a bit like cannons because Br. Dobson based his design on cannon mounts :cool: We've all heard people describe their dobs as 'Yard Cannons'

Well, you know the way I described how the wheel barrow handles when finished in their main function get removed from the scope along with the wheel chuck and how the wheel chuck gets put where the handles were and the hadles get mounted to the back of the mirror tub as counterweights (ie. both kept off the ground out of the muck and not being tripped over after I use them to move the scope)

Well with the handles mounted on the Mirror tub and especially with their foam grips on the ends. They look like a pair of 50Cals mounted on the back of the 'Main Cannon' :) :)

I posted the link to the vids and pics on my local forum the other day to btw. I am starting to get music requests! one lad wants the Close Encounters music tones along with the coloured lights and another guy wants some Battlestar Galactica cylon music playing along with the red light :o

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