For full recipes, please visit our recently launched Egyptian Cuisine Recipes web site.

Make Your Own $2 Artificial Star For Telescope Collimation

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

Tags: 

An Artificial Star is a point source of light. It is used to simulate a real star indoors, so you can collimate your telescope's optics indoors and/or during daylight.

Commercial artificial stars, such as this Hubble Optics one, cost $25 or more, and their main feature is a small plate that has precision holes of 50 micron up to 250 microns.

You can make your own artificial star, which is very close in function to the commercial ones.

You can watch this short 4 minute video on how I did it, and read on for detailed instructions.

How To Fix Audio Skips And Stuttering on a Raspberry Pi

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

If you have been experiencing audio skips or stuttering on a Raspberry Pi, then I may have a solution for you.

For background, I use an older Raspberry Pi as an audio player, using mpd as an audio server, MPD Remote on my Android Phone, and Sonata on my Xubuntu Laptop.

It was working fine for a long time, but then it started skipping audio every 10 or 20 seconds, regularly.

OnStep ESP32 Smart Hand Controller SHC

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

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.

Presentation: Microcontrollers and the Internet of Things (IoT)

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

Tags: 

Last Monday, I gave a talk at the KWLUG on Microcontrollers and The Internet of Things (IoT).

It covered topics such as: how microcontrollers are different from 'computers', the Arduino and Arduino IDE, the ESP8266 and ESP32 WiFi enabled microcontrollers, and using MicroPython on them. Also covered the very low cost STM32 ARM Cortex microcontroller.

OnStep Telescope Controller STM32 PCB and ESP32 SHC Kits

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

A while back, I completed a port of the open source OnStep Telescope Controller firmware to the STM32 Blue Pill ARM Cortex M3 32-bit MCU. Later, Dave Schwartz and myself designed a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that makes building a controller a far easier task than before.

Here is a video of the completed PCB.

Cargo Cults of the Melanesian Islands

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

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.

OnStep Telescope Controller on Low Cost STM32

Submitted by Khalid on

Contents: 

Tags: 

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.

Pages

Subscribe to The Baheyeldin Dynasty RSS