Telescope Reviews: Re: DIY Wedge + Alt-Az

I think your plans would be considered somewhat on the ambitious side

However I have seen some highly successful ATM projects that would shame many serious manufacturers. None of mine are in that category

A couple of issues to consider.

USB is a digital interface, so you can't just vary the voltage to control the motors. There are a number of projects that allow you to control a clock based motor circuit, I'd search for 555 on Cloudy Nights and look at any threads that brings up. USB interfaces are not trivial to build either.

You can also build a small microcontroller to drive a stepper motor, these aren't that difficult (really) to build. Have a look at the EasyPic controller (which I use).

Writing the software to guide isn't trivial to do, e.g. you can write software to read a webcam in real time, but then generating the appropriate offsets, writing commands out to the USB/Parallel/Serial/Bluetooth port is more tricky. You then need to build the receiving end (see previous) on your mount.

So yes you can do it, at the end of the day are you going to get better results than spending a couple of 100 dollars, I don't know but it will take you a lot of time to get this far.

I did look at this and came to the conclusion that it was many hundreds of hours work. The programming side is quite tricky to do and I would not underestimate the time taken to do this. Of course you could use something like PhD guiding and that takes away a lot of the hard work, then all you have to do is design, develop and build an ASCOM compliant mount.

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Thanks,

Rob

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