I have a telescope with a Dobsonian mount and need to create a simple digital setting circle to make it easy to work out where the telescope was pointing. The Arduino micro controller was the perfect choice to get something running quickly:
Sensors
ADXL345 3-Axis Digital Accelerometer is used to measure the angle.
HMC5843 3-Axis Digital Compass IC provides the azimuthal angle of the object.
These use I2C interface to connect to the Arduino, my next version is likely to have a display module to display the results.
Software
I develop my projects for multiple platforms so the Qt user interface for this works on PC and Linux and soon I will have an interface running on Android. For now the application is used to enter the co-ordinates of known starts and display the resulting measurements and is connected to the Arduino board with a USB cable.
The Arduino software is where all the calculations are performed. Using some simple maths to work from calibration points, at known positions, to derive the horizontal co-ordinates for an unknown position. The Arduino code keeps track of Siderial Time so the known co-ordinates can be entered from the star chart and when the calibration is performed position is calculated.
The Arduino software is where all the calculations are performed. Using some simple maths to work from calibration points, at known positions, to derive the horizontal co-ordinates for an unknown position. The Arduino code keeps track of Siderial Time so the known co-ordinates can be entered from the star chart and when the calibration is performed position is calculated.
Contact
If you are interested then please contact me and I can share more.
