Thread: RA drive motors
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Old 14-11-2013, 07:18 AM
Barrykgerdes
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Barrykgerdes is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Beaumont Hills NSW
Posts: 2,900
Hi Frank

You should have a lot of fun making the telescope work. Just like I did over 20 years ago. I worked my DOB over and eventually turned it into a goto/tracking alt/azm system. This was before the days of cheap goto/tracking telescopes. I used a DOB 11 drive system that while it worked for tracking I really only used it as an interface to the stepper drives.

In those days computers were driven with 80286 processors that were really too slow for simple high level programing. However I wrote a program in BASIC that had all the controls to drive the steppers as a goto/tracking telescope complete with catalogues. I got the system to work but it was quite cumbersome and I came into some uncommitted money and bought a LX200 10" telescope. The DOB was put aside but still exists as it was in 1992.

If I had adapted the much later Bartel system to drive the steppers I would have had a much more practical telescope control.

For interest you can obtain the notes and program from

http://barry.sarcasmogerdes.com/obse...s/dobmount.doc

and

http://barry.sarcasmogerdes.com/obse...s/astrodrv.zip

Note: The program has a non operational display for a demo if the dob ll is not available and it has been compiled with Qb64(gl) so it will work on 64 bit computers.

Barry

Last edited by Barrykgerdes; 14-11-2013 at 07:47 AM.
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