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 ...

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.

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.

Topics include

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.

On Friday 13th of April, 2018, I gave a presentation at the KW RASC on Medieval Islamic Astronomy and its influence on Renaissance Europe.

Topics include

On Friday 27th of January, 2018, I gave a presentation at the KW RASC on Al-Sufi's Book Of Fixed Stars.

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.

If you use a telescope for astronomical observation or astrophotography, or a camera for night scenes, such as the aurorae, star trails, and the like, you must have experienced dew building up within an hour or less.