Simon Box

Gosh, sorry. This was a long time ago and I was working on a very old raspberry pi. Poss v1 I think. Using a dongle. I guess you're on more modern pi with Bluetooth on chip? In any case, if this was me, I would probably find the best supported Bluetooth lib on Python 3 + raspberry pi now and refactor the code to use this. There are really only a handful of Bluetooth comms, as I recall, so that's probably the path of least resistance.. Simon On Sat, 20 Feb 2021, 20:30 Mark Episcopo, epif18@users.sourceforge.net...

Hi Mark, Thanks for your interest in the project. Converting to Python 3 is a great idea and would be really valuable for others trying to work with the code. If you would consider pushing your Python 3 version to the project, I will gladly approve and merge it in. Thanks! Simon On Sat, 20 Feb 2021, 08:58 Mark Episcopo, epif18@users.sourceforge.net wrote: found it. Don't know if it works yet, -- PyBluez0.23 Bluetooth Package https://sourceforge.net/p/itelescope/discussion/general/thread/672126d405/?limit=25#3d2f...

p.s. softpots and Pi 3 sounds like a great idea!

Yes - good question. I picked these sensors mainly because they are cheap and were very easy to fit with almost no modifications to the base. I also reasoned I might be able to work around some of their precision shortcomings with software. This turned out to be the case. The non-linearity is not all white-noise. The voltage-position plot looks quite sigmoidal and I was able to fit this with a polynomial to improve precision a lot. Actually, two polynomials as the hysteresis is very large so it selects...

Hi Jeff, I understand your worry. I was a bit concerned about this at first, but in practice it has never been an issue. Usually, I roughly know what I want to observe in an evening and make sure the dead zone is not pointing that way. This - in the UK - almost always means pointing the dead zone North as there is very little of interst there. Fun fact: The 'English' equitorial telescope mount used in a number of large observatories is physically incapable of pointing North: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_mount#English_or_Yoke_mount...

Hi Dwayne 1. You need to write your own control program (or find one from another hobbyist) 2. I made heavy use of the siderial.py lib: http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/lang/python/examples/sidereal/

Check the youtube videos. The first one I posted shows the mounting.

Hi Luke Yes, it should "just work" but I haven't tested this. Let me know how it goes! Also the problem you highlight is an interesting one... I don't do a lot of astrophotography so I have not put a lot of time into addressing it, but given that the approach with digital seems to be "stacking" rather than long exposure I think you could take the rotation out of the images with software as a pre-processing step ahead of stacking.... Simon