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The work progresses
If anyone is interested. Finally, I've had time to sit down and work through the programming steps for this little Arduino project - ATMEGA 168. I like designing things... however odd!
I have also designed a small dithering robot/mechanism (called the Ditherbot or Sparehand) for pushing buttons on my GEM hand controller - I don't want to pull it apart and start soldering, drilling holes etc., (as it's practically an antique and has a negative earth - I don't want to interface at that level), so I've come up with a stepper design that sweeps a toggle plate pressing buttons as it goes. It's set up to dither between shots (of course), including a mirror lock-up/sensor cool delay. No pictures yet, but will post when its complete.
Now that the sequence is under control, a dithering pattern needs to be worked out. At the moment its just doing a box pattern... agricultural - a little experimentation will sort out the motor speed and angular increments to achieve a reasonable pattern.
It needs a frame limit and shutdown sequence. In the future an external timer will be used to power/wake-up at whatever time of the night - but that's pier time. Given the limited space in my yard a small geodesic cover will probably be adequate as I'm not mounting telescopes.
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