After nine months of modifying the OnStep open source telescope controller to run on the cheap STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, it is time to reap the fruits of this long labour: I have an OnStep powered mount ...
Back in mid December 2017, I submitted to Howard the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to enable ports of OnStep to additional platforms in a modular fashion with less effort. Before the STM32 was completed, HAL proved useful in supporting RAMPS, Arduino Due, and lately the ESP32.
What happens when aboriginal people who are living a hunter/gatherer or farmer life style come face to face with 20th century technology and civilization too quickly? Their minds could not fathom the rest of earth's human civilization gradual progression over the past 5,000 or so years.
The people of Tanna island of Vanuatu suddenly woke up during World War II to the U.S. Navy establishing airfields, forward bases, and housing close to 250,000 people, with all the necessary support services, including telephone and cinemas.
Over the winter, I worked with Howard Dutton, the author of OnStep Telescope Controller, to make it work with the low cost STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers. This involved writing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), so adding different architectures in the future would not be too hard, as it was.
On Friday 11th of May, 2018, I gave the second part of my presentation on Islamic Astronomy's Legacy in Arabic Origin Of Modern Star Names. This was for the KW RASC.
Yesterday, I gave a talk for the KWLUG on Incremental Backup For Linux. This is targeted towards home networks or small businesses using Linux, although I touched a bit on some enterprise considerations and technologies.
The solution I use relies on the dump and restore utilities for the ext4 filesystem, along with rsync from laptops.
The slides are attached below, as PDF. The meeting was recorded, and the video should appear here shortly.
The book is the first illustrated pictorial star atlas, and was very influential for centuries after it was authored. It spread widely from central Asia, throughout the Middle East, and to Europe. It was translated into many languages.
Here is the presentation slides, and audio recording:
One of the obstacles in using OnStep is the process of configuring it. A user should start with a spreadsheet that calculates certain parameters. The user is supposed to check that they lie between acceptable ranges mentioned in the spreadsheet.
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