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Hi All,
Finally got around to taking some pictures of the roof mechanism and observatory in general.
The rails for the roof are sliding gate rails and the rollers are the matching ones. They are from Bunnings. They are attached to the long axis of the roof and the rails are mounted to beams which are mounted to the internal frame of the walls, they extend through the walls and stabilise the top of the structure. This is required as the roof would normally be screwed into the top of the walls and do the stabilisation. The wheels are attached by two furniture screws and knobs. With this arrangement I can lower the roof back down onto the walls when not in use as I can pivot the rollers out of the rails and out of the way.
The whole roof is lifted using Viking Hands, placed under a support in the centre of the roof frame at either end. Once it is high enough for the rollers to clear the rails, I can swing them into position and lower the roof onto the rollers and roll it off. The roof is then clamped into this position. The roof can also be clamped in a partially open position (when I'm doing solar stuff), or fully closed but not lowered. Otherwise it is only held on by gravity!
A Bunnings set of shelves converted into a bench provides most of the storage. I tried a stainless steel bollard for a pier, but it is not stable enough, or high enough, so I'll have to get one built.
The whole shebang is powered by two Bluetti power packs, should be enough to run an overnight imaging run with two cameras. I bought a 200 W solar panel from Supercheap Auto (not the portable one in the picture below) and have that bolted to the roof to charge these during the day. As a backup I can run a power lead there if they don't charge from the sun.
I have a wireless mesh node in the observatory which connects well into the house wifi and then this is used to run the Eagle 4 on scope computer.
If anyone has better ideas for the lift mechanism, I'm all ears. I was going to use a lever mechanism, but this was beyond my engineering skills.
Cheers
Stu
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