A month ago, Dave Schwartz completed a design for a Smart Hand Controller (SHC) for the OnStep open source telescope controller.

After completing the hardware, I ported the firmware for it, from the Teensy 3.x to the lower cost ESP32.

Here is a video that I did demonstrating the features.

PCB

Here is an image of the SHC PCB, V1.03.

Infrastructure Kit

And here are the infrastructure components that form the kit.

Functionality of the SHC

The general functionality of the SHC is described on OnStep's SHC Wiki page.

Ordering An ESP32 SHC Kit

Kits for building an ESP32 SHC can be ordered at this Order form.

Assembly Instructions for the ESP32 SHC

You can read the detailed assembly instructions online, or download it as a PDF, at this Google document.

The document also contains pictures of the parts that you can order at eBay or other online market places.

Notes

That that although the kit includes the plastic button caps with the 6 single-action buttons (because they came with the caps), there is no button cap included with the 5-way button (because it didn't come with one).

The 3D-printable buttons work better than the original buttons for the single-action buttons anyway so it is not really expected that they would be used once in the case. The buyer is going to have to 3D-print the 5-way button when it gets added to the case design (the caps for the single-action buttons do not work on the 5-way).

3D Printed Case

The instructions to obtain the STL files necessary to print your own 3D Printed case, are available in the above assembly instructions. The instructions also cover how to print the parts needed.

You can see pictures of a complete SHC with a 3D printed case in this post.