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I tried a quick imaging trial last night just to see how it behaved.
this is a 20s unprocessed single frame with a 1000d.
very rough polar alignment, eyeballed collimation, manual focus, no coma corrector (F4).
I'm happy with the response of the drive train to speed change commands, but I need to increase the clock speed of my mcu to 64Mhz, as the current minimum increment for pulsewidth changes is too big at 32Mhz clock.
I found that the overall stiffness has improved a lot with this pier design, only flex is in my RA shaft and the fork arms, so will be redesigning them shortly along with a steel hollow shaft.
clutch works well, gearbox is also pretty responsive. there is a bit of backlash that shows when the motor is driven slow, but once engaged, it doesn't drift.
the good thing with the clutch is that I can keep tracking on and move the scope to another target manually and leave it, it continues tracking.
But its very sensitive to balancing so it took me a while to get my head around how the weights affect balance. good thing with forks is that the counterweight requirement is very small. hardly 1 to 2 kgs just to counter the camera.
Can I measure PE with a guidecam on a guidescope? How do you'll get the PE graphs with deviation in RA and DEC?
I also have to learn to drift align.
Can someone tell me what the orientation of the dslr body should be with respect to the ota? perpendicular to the optical axis, parallel, 45 deg?
reason is I don't understand what the star drift direction should be across the screen in live view with tracking off. once I understand that, I can learn to drift align.
Next bits are dec drive, encoder on both axes, st4 interface, lx200 goto. I hope to have them done soon, else I'm going to have to live in the garage after all the cutting and drilling that my wife's been patiently monitoring and enduring!!
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