Quote:
Originally Posted by Satchmo
Surprised no one mentioned the DOb Driver. Its been around for years and currently USD $699.
http://homepages.accnorwalk.com/tddi...000/page3.html
I used one for about a year on my 14" but now its gathering dust as running a drive takes extra care and charged batteries and in the end `lentil power' won out . Thats John Dobson speak for `hand-pushing' 
Mark |
Hi Mark
I had one of those DDR2 drivers about 13 years ago. I had an 8" dob in those days. It still exists, My daughter has it in Adelaide.
I spent many months modifing my DOB mount with ball bearing rollers and preloaded centre spindle for the azm platform and ball races for the alt yokes. The operation was very smooth and the DDR2 used to drive it quite effectively.
I then wrote a program in Qbasic to drive it as an automatic go to telescope, complete with ngc/Ic catalogue, Star catalogue and moon and planet calculator. I wrote a two star alignment routine that even used to print out the coords of my location. (not "quite" as "accurate" as a GPS)
The basic movement of the scope in track mode was a bit jumpy because the program was originally clocked every second from the computer clock. When I got a faster computer I worked out a routine synched by the computer clock that updated the position every 1/10 second. This smoothed the tracking nicely.
I then came into some money and bought a 10" LX200 so the Dob was given away! Ah! they were the days (nights).
Barry