by C.Y. Tan 2018
It is well-known, that the new GTOCP4 control box can be controlled with a phone or a pad. However, I really like the feel of real buttons in a controller rather than using "virtual" buttons on a phone or pad. This means that the only solution that Astro-Physics (AP) has for people like me is to buy their AP keypad.
If I had the AP keypad, I will mainly use it for Polar aligning with PoleMaster and for recalibrating (which is the same as syncing for all other mounts). After polar alignment and recalibrating, PHD2 will be used for guiding the scope. Therefore, the AP keypad will only be used at the start of my imaging session, and no more. Thus, it is hard for me to justify spending $1000 for an AP keypad when I will hardly use. I had to figure out a solution.
And here's my solution:
- I have built a simple hand controller for my Mach1GTO. Its purpose is not to replace the AP keypad because it does not initialize the CP4, have any star database or goto capability etc. My goal is to just move the mount for calibrating the mount to a star and be compatible with PoleMaster.
The goal of my hand controller is to be low cost (less than $200). The simplest way I know how to do this is to base it on an Arduino controller. The other low cost components are
- A small 64x48 OLED display for showing the user options and the state of the controller.
- A thumb joystick for selecting menu items and for moving the telescope in RA and DEC.
- The hand controller will be connected to the same port that the AP keypad uses.
This is unsupported hardware. Build at your own peril! :)
You can submit questions or bug reports using the issues tab on the right and then click on NEW.
Have fun!
- howto Assembly instructions for the hand controller.
- ponoko The files that are used for laser cutting the acrylic parts of the design. These files can be sent directly to Ponoko for laser cutting.
- bom Bill of materials for one hand controller.
- eagle Eagle schematic and board files.
- arduino Source code for the hand controller.
- pics Photographs used in the README's and Wiki.
- user manual contains the hand controller user manual.
More information can be found in he README.md files in each directory and the wiki of this project on github.
All the software, documentation, and hardware that I have written is copyright 2018 C.Y. Tan.
All software is released under GPLv3
All documentation is released under:
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
- GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
All hardware is released under CERN Hardware Open License v1.2