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.
If you want to use the Arduino IDE for STM32F103 boards, you need to do the following.
The instructions are for Linux, but it is just downloading, extracting and renaming, so you can use similar steps for Windows of Mac OS/X.
First, go to the Arduino web site
Select your platform, and download
Extract the IDE
tar xJvf ~/Desktop/arduino-1.8.5-linux64.tar.xzRename the directory
AstroEQ is another GOTO telescope controller from the UK.
Basically, the author was a university student when he started this project, to convert a non-GOTO motorized mount into a GOTO mount.
A ready made AstroEQ controller is available for purchase. It has USB on one side, and two connectors for steppers on the other.
In these pages, I describe how to make a Do It Yourself (DIY) Telescope Controller. That is, a piece of electronics that would at a minimum drive motors on the telescope to track the sky.
The features should be:
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