Quote:
Originally Posted by rcheshire
This is a good read. Outside my technical knowledge but interesting. alistairsam you mention using a picaxe microcontroller for goto. Was this in preference to the arduino. My skills are pretty basic, so wondering what the advantages are. I'm resisting hacking into my GEM and automating things, encoders and such, but it's tempting.
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Hi,
just to state the obvious, I'd advise against hacking into your mount unless required and unless you're confident of the mod, but yes, the picaxe's are incredibly easy to use and program. they're targeted toward school students starting off with microcontrollers, yet they've become very versatile and powerful withe latest generation M2 chips.
eg. they support machester encoding for rf transmission straight out with a simple command, rfout!. so you have rfin at the receiver and the picaxes handle CRC, manchester encoding and so on. same with IR.
several features like 8 way multitasking etc. so love it, the forum has some really knowledgeable guys as well.
I had a look at the arduino, but wasnt too comfortable with the language, picaxe was easy for me as it uses normal basic with some minor variations.
I'm working on the lx200 protocol interpreter for autoguiding, so should have it done soon. just fiddling around trying to decide on a decent guiding cam/scope setup. might get the bintel mini guidescope package.
am tempted with the skywatcher synguider.