DIY Low Cost Dew Controller
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 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.xz
Rename 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:
OnStep Telescope is an open, very capable and feature rich telescope controller by Howard Dutton.
On October 2nd, 2017, I gave a talk at the KWLUG on Open Source Software for Astronomy.
The software programs demonstrated in this talk include the following:
Using a planetarium program is a very common thing for any amateur astronomer. I use three such programs, namely: Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel (SkyCharts), and KStars.
As someone who only runs Linux, I occasionally need to run DOS for updating the BIOS on various machines.
Floppy disks are no more an option, since it has been nearly two decades with machines not shipping with them. Therefore, the only realistic option is using USB flash drives.
One excellent alternative to Microsoft MS-DOS, is FreeDOS, a free clone that needs very little resources to run. It can be used to run legacy applications, and one of them is flashing a new BIOS.
When I select a Linux version to run, I always use the latest stable long term release version. For example, for XFCE based Xubuntu, I am now on 16.04.
However, being with a long term release version means that for some software packages, you will have older versions. One such case is telescope automation platform, Ekos and the associated INDI Library.
To make sure that you are running the latest Ekos and INDI library, you can do the following:
First, purge all the KStars and INDI packages, if they are installed:
Various little bits of information ...
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