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A very rainy day in Melbourne is a good time for an update on the CDK250.
The design and the manufacturing processes of the OTA have now fully matured. If you look at the advertisement column on IIS you will see a paid ad that takes you to my website. Not sure how long I will keep running the ad because the cost will have to reflect in the price of the OTA and I'm trying to keep that as low as possible.
The main development is the fact that I can now anneal the glass blanks "in house". There was a bit of a learning curve involved but I'm quite happy with the results. So serial number 004, recently finished, uses annealed Borofloat 33 glass for the mirrors.
Another development is that two different users have now validated the design for full frame sensor use. Something that I could not do because I only have APS-C sensor cameras.
There was also a cosmetic improvement with the logo. Before I used a 3D printed stencil for applying the logo to the carbon tube, before the final polyurethane coat, and that was very limiting regarding the choice of fonts.
The spider vanes are now made from 4 layers of unidirectional carbon fiber and no 3D printed component used, like in the case of the prototype, as seen in this thread.
The spider hub now contains only a small PCB with connectors that join the ribbon cable with the secondary heater and the secondary thermal sensor.
The firmware for the thermal controller has been fine tuned and improved. The older firmware did not capture all the, occasional, bad readings caused by fan generated electrical noise, when reading the 3 thermal sensors.
Although the thermal controller works in stand alone mode, there is another thermal sensor associated with the EAF that can be accessed remotely for those that want to keep a record of the thermal conditions throughout the night, or day.
Thanks for looking.
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