[Nico13 (Ken)]

Recently I had my Rigel Systems NStep stepper focus driver quit on me and so being a bit budget conscious looked for an alternative.
Hearing so much about ARDUINO decided this was the way to go. I started with an ARDUINO UNO board and a ULN2003 stepper driver and some basic code and soon wound up with a rudimentary but operating focus driver, but before putting it all into little boxes etc. I came across the "sgl_observatory_automation" group over on Yahoo groups, a great little recourse for this sort of thing plus more, cloud sensor, due control, that I haven't delved into yet.
Anyway the result is what you see below, total cost of about 35-40 bucks, that is for the non-genuine boards of course, if you purchased the originals add 30 or so dollars to that, the stepper motor I had sitting around so if you have to purchase one of those add a bit more. The EasyDriver does the hard work and the UNO just supplies the logic via the USB/COM port.
The software for the ARDUINO and the GUI interface all available from the Yahoo group.
All that remains to do is swap the unipolar I currently have fitted for the bipolar you see in the pictures.
This setup is also ASCOM compatible and will apparently run via ASCOM controls but I haven’t tried that as I think the standalone GUI is better at this stage.
Comments and questions welcome.