Adam@SheekGeek

DIY Learning tower

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Having a toddler that always wants to help in the kitchen, there’s a need to have a safer alternative to having them just stand on a chair to reach the countertop. I had no idea, but this is already a thing called a learning tower. Kind of a overblown name for a stool with guard rails if you ask me, but whatever. As a note, this blog post if filled with affiliate links. I thought you might like to have the entire tools list.

After looking online at learning towers (and learning what they are) I was learning toward buying some IKEA parts and hacking them together like so many others online, however IKEA stopped selling one of the crucial components. This left me having to do some custom work. If you’re in for a penny you’re in for a pound so I started looking at custom designs for learning towers. After about an hour of research Jess just said “go see what scrap wood we have and we’ll cobble something together.”

We happened to have a scrap piece of wood that used to be a leaf blower hovercraft… for… reasons. It was 33 inches by 36 inches. Of course with a hole in it for the leaf blower to mount. That’ll do. It’s just tall enough for our countertop and just wide enough that when split in half it can hold a toddler with a bit of wiggle room. Final dimensions of the sides were 36″tall by 16″ wide.

I sliced it up to be the sides of the learning tower. Then I got to (finally) use my router table and my 1″  diameter 1/2″ depth roundover bit for the first time. The trick is not to have the bit stick up too far on the router table, otherwise you’ll get a nice roundover on the edge, but it’ll cut deep enough to leave the face of the wood raised a bit proud. This would then need to be sanded down (unless you like the look and feel of it). Run this on both sides of each piece to get a nice smooth rounded edge. It makes it safer for tiny hands as well as making it look more professional.  I got my router table from Craigslist that a guy had built from this plan on a woodworking website for $10. He was upgrading and it was taking up space so I got it for less than the wood costed him. It didn’t come with the router itself for that price. I had to get my own. It was the perfect excuse to get a beefier router for future projects than the Dewalt DW611 trim router I have in my Xcarve CNC machine. I stuck with Dewalt for the brand and got a DW616 model with the fixed base. I mounted it on the underside of my table and when I need to, I can unscrew it and use it manually.

Now to attach the two side panels. In the old scrap pile, we had an 8 foot section of 1×2″ pine. I have no clue why it was magically there when we needed it, I don’t remember ever buying it. Regardless, it was good to be used. Jess threw out the number of 16″ for the space between the sides of the tower. That worked out to having 6 of these beams. Of course they were a bit shorter due to the kerf of the blade. I cut these using my pull saw and a plastic miter box. The draw saw is the best thing to ever slice bread. Especially for trim pieces, the cuts are very precise, the blade has minimal kerf, and it cuts very quickly. In fact I use this saw over a push saw on all my projects be it cutting 4x4s or moulding. At this point, stumbling our way through the design, we settled on something with ladder-like steps the kid could climb up, and that we could reposition the platform as they grow.

I knocked off the sharp 90 degree edges of the 1×2 pieces using a cornering tool kit. This tool looks like an old can opener and works kind of like a plane to scrape the edges into a smoother shape. I got a kit a couple years ago for a project and have wanted to use them on something else for a while now. I have to say, this is way better than trying to smooth the corners of these small pieces with sandpaper and much safer for your fingers than using a router table for these small pieces.

Normally, connecting pieces of wood in this way leaves much to be desired. If you drill directly into the side panel into the end of the 1×2 piece you’ll have a really weak joint and you’ll see the screw on the side of the panel. It isn’t strong because the wood fibers (visible by looking at the grain) are aligned along the long axis of the 1×2. Wood fibers are basically long tubes that the water gets drawn up into the tree through. When you screw directly into the end, imagine that you are screwing into the end of a stack of straws. The fibers spread around the screw and there’s not much for the screw to grip on. The best way to connect these pieces is with Pocket Holes. I got a great and versatile pocket hole jig made by Kreg recently and this was a great chance to try it out. Probably 10 years ago I got a knock off pocket hole jig made of aluminum to save some money, but it ended up working for barely one project before the guide holes got all wallowed out and useless. It also could only accept a certain size piece of wood as it was a piece of extruded aluminum. This kreg kit on the other hand can accept a wide range of pieces of wood. It also has guides for making the perfect depth hole based on the the wood thickness. The drill guide is completely removable to use on parts in situ as well. All in all, the Kreg kit is the best bet by far.

I messed up one of the beams by not setting the correct depth for the pocket hole, so that left me with 5 total. That works out to 4 on the bottom for the ladder step and platform holder and then one for the back at the top. I typically have found that 1-1/4″ drywall screws are just about the most useful type of screw to have laying around for just about any project, so I used a single screw on each end of the beams to attach them.  (Now there are times when to buy different screws, but in most cases these will work fine). To keep the beams from spinning about the screws (even though the pocket holes helped with this by being slightly off axis) I tacked each beam through the side panels with 2 finishing nails from my brad gun.

I then cut a platform out of a piece of 1/2″ scrap plywood to fit between the side panels. To make sure this thing will stay in place, I attached a 1/2″ square dowel on the front and back edges just inside where the platform rests on the beams. I glued it and tacked it with brads.

When we got to this point we realized the design was a little tippy front to back and didn’t sit squarely on the floor. Going back to the scrap pile, I cut out two sets of “feet” about 18″ long and 3″ tall.  I then cut these in half so they’d stick out of the front and back more when I mounted them. Of course I rounded them off at the router table again with the same bit. I attached them to the bottom of the tower with wood glue and brad nails that I once again cut off the excess length with a hacksaw and sanded them smooth with an orbital sander. This added 5-6 inches to the footprint on the front and back making the whole thing much more stable.

   

A touch of wood putty here and there to fill in gaps in the edges of the plywood and cover the most visible pocket holes, a light sanding all over, and a couple cans of dark grey spray paint on the edges and interior did a majority of the finishing. Jess had some wood-flavored contact paper and added that to the exterior of the side panels.

A few coats of spray-on polyurethane on the platform finished that part off. Jess modge podged the edge of the contact paper to the rounded end of the sides and voila’ our learning tower was complete.  –Though after use by the sink it was shown that it’s better to use the exterior modge podge instead. It is a little hardier when it gets wet that the regular stuff.

What to do with all these Jawbone devices now the company is defunct?

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(TLDR: Jawbone Replacements – Fitbit Inspire HR, Fitbit Charge 3, Garmin Vívoactive 3 Music)

Having gotten a couple Jawbone Up24 devices a few years ago for dirt cheap (<$10 each used)  I thought it was a great deal, until Jawbone shut down their servers recently.  The app no longer works for tracking steps or sleep, you can’t create new accounts or anything anymore.  I think it’s a damn shame that even while the company is dying with no hope of saving it, they haven’t open sources their hardware/software. As a plea to all companies, especially those with millions of devices already in the market, please open your designs to the public if your company is dying!!!  Otherwise all those devices are going to end up in landfills even though they still have the ability to work. I realize that there may be some tech you can’ share such as what’s involved in patent disputes, but at least open the parts of the code that provide basic functionality for hackers to work with!

For the Jawbone UP24 bands I have, I did some googling and found someone who wrote an app that allows the UP bands to vibrate when your phone gets notifications which still works even after Jawbone’s API has been taken offline. This is a great thing to use for things such as calendar notifications or timer on your phone.  Here’s my journey into getting these things to work.

If you don’t currently have a jawbone device, you can get them online second hand pretty easily and for practically nothing nowadays.  YOu can’t buy them from stores anymore though.  I recommend you pick up a UP24 band.

The next step is to fix the band if you need to. I did a hard reset on my band as it wasn’t charging correctly. Here’s the steps

To hard reset your band, please follow these steps:

Press the button on your band 10 times. Try to pace the presses at about about one press every second.

On the 10th press, PRESS + HOLD the button for 15 FULL SECONDS, or until the sun status light appears. Once you see the light, let go of the button. (via https://blog.mornati.net/)

Doing a hard reset will wipe all saved data from the device, but since Jawbone’s servers are down and likely for the count, I don’t think that matters much.

Next download the Jawbone App. As I mentioned before, it won’t track steps or sleep, or allow you to connect to a jawbone account, however you need this to pair your UP24 band to your phone.  This is required after a hard reset. Open the app and click through the screens (don’t try to sign or log in as it won’t work, their servers are turned off) but you’ll eventually come to a point where you need to pair the device as shown in the video below.  This worked for me with no problem at all and without having to log in.

The next part (after pairing the device with your phone) is to download the app to allow you to push notifications called UpNotifications in the play store. You can select which apps you will allow. This app does cost $1.79, but given that you can get the device <$10 (we got one for $3 on ebay), and this app for <$2 I think it’s still worth it. What’s cool is the builder of this app Stefano Brilli documented the process of building this app on his blog.

In the UpNotifications app, simply go to the top and switch on notifications, then go to “select band” and it should be populated in the list with it’s address. CLick that, then select which apps you want to be able to push notifications to the band.

It should be noted that this app might support more than just Jawbones. It detected my FitBit Charge 2 device as well.

Tada! You just saved a functional device from the ending up in a landfill. This is truly recycling in the sense that you’re ReUsing (reduce, reuse, recycle). LIke other forms of recycling, it’s a bit of a downgrade of the band’s once glorious functionality, but at least now you’ve given it a second life.

Another quick note if you encounter problems, the only troubleshooting info I have from the UpNotifications app says to make sure your firmware is updated. SInce you can’t access the jawbone app, I’m not sure how that’s possible. If you figure it out, or have any other hacks for these little guys, feel free to post them in the comments.

I will recommend updating to a different company’s fitness band. There are a ton of options, and I have only tried a few. For instance, I mentioned the Fitbit Charge 2 earlier. This is a great basic step counter and heart rate tracker and when paired with your phone can map your exercises using the phone’s GPS.  I loved the small size and simple interface. It tracks heart rate constantly and does a great job of detecting how well you’ve slept (showing you a chart with deep sleep, REM, and showing how many times you were awake or restless in the night). The heart rate tracker can also estimate cardio fitness score, a measure of how healthy you are overall.

After using my Fitbit Charge 2 for more than a year, I decided that I wanted more features like integrated GPS so I didn’t need to bring my phone with me when I exercised. I tried the Samsung Gear S2. This is a full android device that can make cell phone calls and has Svoice (Samsung’s version of Siri) which I found worked well. It has built-in apps for heart rate, GPS tracking of exercises. (Though I used both the MapMyRun and Endomondo apps for the watch as well). The Heart rate monitoring isn’t constant, rather it can be set to measure when you are still for a programmable period of time (sucha s 10 or 30 minutes). It doesn’t have a native sleep tracker app so I tried a couple apps I downloaded.  Most of the apps available for the phone are actually just watch faces which is disappointing. I love that this watch was waterproof so I could shower and swim with it, and the wireless charging feature.  Eventually I got rid of it though because it had to be recharged every day. I got it used so maybe the previous owner had messed up the battery. Regardless, I moved on.

I settled on the Garmin Vivoactive 3 which I charge about as often as the Fitbit, only once a week. It has integrated GPS so I don’t need to bring my phone to track my exercise. It also has a great heart rate monitor and is one of the few watches with Heart Rate Variability (HRV) monitoring features which can be used to determine how healthy you are. It is also waterproof, and has a full color screen which you can easily see in full daylight.

In all, there isn’t a ton that can be done with the Jawbone’s now that their servers are offline unless someone backwards engineers the communication protocol to set up new bands with an app. This is very unlikely given the current scenario. The best option is to move to another company. Fitbit, Garmin, and samsung’s stock prices are all pretty steady over the last year so I believe they will stick around for the long haul. Samsung owns South Korea so it isn’t going anywhere, and garmin has been in the GPS game for ages.

Making a Simple Sign with Fusion360 and Xcarve

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(Video below)

So I just got back into fighting working with my CNC machine.  After a few failed attempts at PCBs (I’ll post what I learned there some other time) I thought I’d work on something on the macro scale.  Below are notes to myself on the workflow.

Designing a sign in Fusion 360, simple enough. CAM is tough though, especially when using mm.

First I had Jess (Queen of fonts) find a cursive font that connected most of the letters together and had her create a SVG file for me of it.  She used photoshop and MakeTheCut (for our Zing vinyl cutter) to generate the SVG.

I used easel to get the settings I would use for feeds and speeds, then converted them to mm. This can likely be fixed by creating my own tools file locally with these values hard-coded as defaults.

Realize that my machines is Left hand rule orthoganal axes.
Z
^   Y
|   /
| /
*——> X with Y pointing into the screen.

Set CAM origin to nearest-leftist-top face of project stock (0,0,0)-ish on my machine

Set up a 2D contour and select the bottom of the design to be cut out. Make sure to select all the inner contours as well. Add a tab or so to the inner parts to prevent them flopping around or going ballistic.

Multiple passes, no more than 1/2 bit thickness each with triangular tabs.

I set clearance heights at 5mm, 10mm is safer but slower. (Click pic to make bigger).

In the first 2D contour settings tab, you must select the tool. The menu seems to have changed since I last saw it. Simply use the search bar at the top. I used 1/8″ as my term and easily found something that would work.

Export the CAM using smoothieboard CAM process. Save the file with a .gcode extension. We’ll be using printrun (does anything else work for smoothieboard?) which only looks for .gcode files.

(needed?) Open the file by hand like a cave man and add “G1 Z5” to the code JUST BEFORE the first G0 or G1 command. This will raise the bit to a safe height from the start. I might be able to ignore this if I follow the correct steps below… but do it until I learn better.  I might also be able to modify the smoothie post processor to add this in.

I used 2-sided scotch tape to secure the part. It works well for light duty stuff.

Using the step blocks, set the gantry roughly equal on each side to square up the machine. This is a tip from a youtube video I cannot find again (sorry to the guy who made it. Thanks man, you’re the real MVP). I got my step blocks for practically nothing online. Bonus, once you’ve squared you floppy gantry with them, you can use them as they were designed to be used, as actual step blocks with clamps for holding your stock down to the table top as well.

Turn motors on and use printrun to move to Set up the X and Y of the machines to where Fusion360’s workpiece offset was (nearest-leftist-top face of stock).

Raise the bit like 30mm and prep for an air run.

Reset axes, then RESET THE SMOOTHIE. Fully disconnect and reconnect, and I don’t mean in printrun, I mean unplug the USB cable and plug it back in. This is the only way to change the stupid machine offsets which will cause problems. If you don’t, before the machine does the G1 Z5 we added, it’ll immediately move to the place the router was when you powered on the smoothie last. Often times this means moving directly through the stock, especially if the Z was touching the stock or lower when you started running the file. IT WILL ALWAYS GO BACK TO MACHINE 0,0,0 BEFORE GOING TO WORKPIECE 0,0,0 AND STARTING YOUR PROGRAM.

Once you’ve rebooted the smoothie, load the file and run an air cut (at Z 30mm) to verify nothing funky happens.

Once this is all verified, move to the actual start position you want (bit touching the top of the stock)

Adjust the Z by hand to verify starting position.

COMPLETELY REBOOT THE SMOOTHIE ONCE MORE. The whole shebang, unplugging and all.

Turn Speed on router to lowest setting. If I had a superPID it’d be able to go the correct speed but as it stands it is almost always spinning too fast.

Turn on the router, turn on the vacuum, connect to the smoothie, reload the .gcode file in printrun, then Run the file.

Keep an eye out especially at first, always be ready to smack the E-stop.

If you smack the E-stop, be ready to jog the machine back to the workpiece offset (or new area of the workpiece ) and completely reboot the smoothie. The latest printrun (1.6.0)/smoothie firmware (April 4th 2018 firmware) I’m using seems to lag dramatically after E-stop has been reset and could be dangerous.

 

How to Permanently Remove Pet Odors from Flooring

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We have had a few instances of having to deal with pet odors. I finally came up with the holy grail of killing pet odors from flooring. I’ll warn you, it’s not easy, but it is a permanent fix and it prevents animals from continually marking their territory after you’ve cleaned it.

Both places we’ve lived recently, the previous owners had pet stains in the carpets. This caused our old cat (RIP little buddy) to mark his territory in the corners of the walls. In our last house, this was mostly upstairs. Cat urine is one of the worst things to try to get rid of because when the urine dries it leaves behind crystals of uric acid.  When these crystals are dry, you won’t smell anything, but they will stink when they get wet. This is why you can clean up a pet accident, but the animal might continue to mark that same spot. They can still smell the uric acid. These crystals won’t easily be dissolved in water and detergent like other parts of pet urine so they are incredibly tough to remove. There are two ways to remove the smell. One is to seal it in, and the other is to use enzymes to break the crystals down completely.

In our upstairs in both our old home and our current home, the previous owners’ pet stains caused our cat to stake his claim in the same places. After a while, even after cleaning it with a carpet shampooer (which we went through several models of…) it still wouldn’t get completely rid of the smell and he would still mark. Any time we opened the windows, the humidity from outside would reactivate the crystals and the whole room would smell again. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and ripped the carpet out.

Now that’s a drastic step, I know, but it was disgusting before we moved in we just couldn’t afford to fix the problem then. Removing the carpet was only the first step. The next thing I had to do was remove the baseboards because the urine had wicked up into the baseboards which were made out of compressed dust and swollen. The only thing remaining with the smell was the wooden subfloor. There’s no way I’m replacing those, so I decided to seal them so no moisture could ever reach the crystals.

The Sealing method:

Regular paint won’t work as a good sealant for this kind of job as over time, the molecular structure has holes big enough for water to pass through. Now I don’t own a scanning electron microscope, but I know this because when I tried regular latex paint, humid and rainy days would reactivate the stink. In my research I found that Shellac had incredibly small pores once dry. Zinsser BIN is a white-pigmented premixed shellac sealer. This stuff is often used and marketed for permanently sealing in odors from smoke damage, mold and mildew, and pet odors. It works great!  I must warn you, it the shellac is in a denatured alcohol solvent. Basically, it smells like you are pouring vodka on the floor and you definitely need a lot of ventilation.

Putting down several coats of this will seal in the stink for good, then you can replace the baseboards and treat the floor. In our old house we used these peel and stick floor planks. In our current home, we actually just painted the subfloor in the whole room which gave it a really cool industrial look. We then made this room into our home office. It was also a great place to play guitar and sing due to all the echos. We left it this way until we could afford to redo the floor in the other parts of the house.

The Enzyme Method:

On our concrete slab, we also had pet odor issues. This time I went for the other method, using enzymes to remove the crystals all together. To kill the pet stank and prevent our cats from marking or remarking the areas, I treated the floor after removing the carpets. The entire floor had to be treated, so I had to do smaller areas one at a time. We’ve had experience with Simple Green enzyme odor removers in the past, but they had a fragrance that left the floor smelling like a port-a-potty. Another cleaner I got was Enzyme D which is hugely popular and used in many schools for cleaning body fluids, however after ordering a case of the stuff, I saw that its ingredients included a benzene-based salt in it. I’m no chemist, so I called the company. They were nice enough to connect me to their chemist who told me that the benzene is harmless since it was bound up in a salt. From what I know, salts dissociate in solvents such as water, which  (in my mind) would leave benzene ions loose and floating in the solution. Salts also form crystals when the water dries up, so unless you plan on super flushing the scene with water, there will be traces of benzene salt everywhere. With Jess expecting, I wasn’t about to risk it though, so we returned that cleaner.

The cleaner I ended up getting is the absolute best we’ve ever used! Vet’s Best Total Plus stain remover has a very mild fragrance which dissipated completely in a couple of days. It has enzymes as well as bacteria in it to help remove odors. Since the odors were really bad, I saturated the slab of concrete with this cleaner and quickly covered the area with giant plastic bags or plastic painters tarp. I then sat books and heavy boxes on the perimeter to keep the liquid contained as long as possible. The longer this stuff is liquid, the better it works. I let this sit  and eat away at the crystals for 3 or 4 days before removing the plastic and moving on t o the next section of flooring. This process took about 2 weeks to completely remove the pet odors from the entire concrete slab. I let the floor dry for a few days before putting down the flooring we chose, which you can read about in another post.

This completely removed the stink in all weather conditions, and our cats no longer feel the urge to purge on the floor. It has been some 2 years at this point and we’ve yet to have another incident or to smell anything!

UPDATE: WE’ve come across another great cleaner called Bioclean Bac-Out which uses enzymes and has a nice fresh lime scent. Since cats don’t like citrus smells this can help give them more of an aversion to using the same spot twice if there are accidents I’ve found.

Working with What You Have (astrophotography)

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After reading my conundrum with my astrophotography equipment, I gathered what I had and looked for a solution.

Since I’m in no way able to afford a huge tricked out scope (we got a great deal on my 8″ LX10 on craigslist!) I’m sticking with what I have. Again, there’s a tracker on my scope but it is basically a barn door tracker. It is slightly more sophisticated though, it has a controller with “North, South, East, and West” buttons on it. As long as it is perfectly polar aligned (I’ll talk about this later) all I have to do is turn it on and it’ll automatically track whatever the scope is pointed at (this is typical barn door behavior) but if I want to drive the scope to look at something to the east, I hold down the “East” button on the controller, and it will DOUBLE the speed of the motor… making 1 revolution in 12 hours instead of 24. Wow right! Not so speedy. Well, it gets better. If I want to look at something West of my current object, holding the “West” button turns the motor off completely. The telescope then simply waits for the earth to spin until that object is within view. The North and South buttons work a little differently, the scope doesn’t move either of these directions unless a button is pushed. When it is, it turns on a motor that moves **Just as slow as the tracker motor.** It can also only move in a particular North/South direction until a screw on the mount bottoms out. This limits the number of degrees of rotation I can do North to South. Typically, I set it up so that when I start viewing, I’m in the middle of the screw, which gives me just as much leeway North as South, but halves the total amount I can move the scope in any one particular direction.

All this means that there’s no way I can whip this thing around to look at whatever I want automatically like GoTo systems do.  I’ll have to unlock the clutches on each axis, then swing it manually to point at an object of interest, then lock the clutches down again and let the motors take over. I’m fine with that, but how do I know where things are in the sky? I’m not great at memorizing locations of stars and DSOs. My solution is to use a PushTo setup. A PushTo is for dumb telescopes. Basically, you attach it to your scope and it tracks where you are manually moving it to point. The best solution I’ve found for this is an app called Skeye.  It is like google sky map, except it was designed so you can mount your tablet or phone to your OTA (Optical Tube Assembly… or Tube where your mirrors and lenses are). I’ll do a tutorial on how to setup and use this as well. For now, check out this guy’s setup.

So I can find objects in the sky, how do I take good photos of them? Due to budget (none really) I have to work with what I have, I first need to make sure that:
1. I am relatively well alighed with true North. (Not perfectly aligned, but close enough and I can do this quick and dirty).
2. I manually move the scope to point at what I want to look at. (This is easy enough).
3. Use a computer to automatically control the direction of the scope for long periods of time.

That last one is a doosey. And so that’s where my adventure began a few years back. I joined the yahoo support group for LX10 owners. Luckily, some of those guys have figured out different ways to hack together store-bought systems with their LX10s. Many of them were a bit too advanced for me (I don’t own a machine shop nor and I spending several hundred dollars on buying another telescope brand’s trackers and rigging it to my system in the hopes that I don’t fry it…) A guy named gt_keys had already been looking at a simple solution to connect an LX10 to computer-based guidance systems via an arduino connection. I like this idea because it can be used with multiple kinds of computer software.

The arduino hardware and code was developed by yahoo user gt_keys in Spring 2013. You can find his threads on the LX10 yahoo group; specifically, these files come from the files section.  I’ll ask if he would put it on GitHub, or if he minds if I do so you can download it.

He has also developed a RaspberryPi version as well that seems to be more capable. Seeing as how the LX-10 is limited in the Dec and Right Ascension speeds, this arduino implementation will work fine for most things though you need to be connected to a computer of some type.

This requires a number of software packages to be installed:

  1. Arduino IDE… so you can download the firmware
  2. PHD Guidance 2 which tracks video of a star then send commands to a scope
  3. ASCOM platform which are a middle-man layer between PHD2 and whatever telescope driver you are using
  4. Meade Classic and Autostar 1 drivers (See below)
  5. Should you want to control your actual camera DSLR or astronomy webcam, some software for this. It will vary based on your particular camera, but FireCapture is one I’ve heard of for astronomy cameras like the ZWO brand or Celestion NexImage5 which I hear is good. As for a Canon, Nikon, or other brand, you can google around and find something to drive them. I’m testing out DSLRDashboard which supports many Canon and Nikon cameras.

So the hardware flow looks like this: You’ll have a USB webcam attached to your sighting scope which will feed data to a program called PHD Guider 2. See my post for how to attach a USB camera to your sighting scope. This must also have the ASCOM drivers installed which know how to talk to different telescope systems. Specifically we will need the “Meade Classic and Autostar 1” driver. (I can’t remember exactly which driver it is on the ASCOM site, but it is either this one or this one). This can be found in the settings menu of PHD2. I went through the “new equipment wizard” in PHD2 to create a group of settings for my equipment. Again, since the LX-10’s hardware is so limited, there isn’t much to enter really. There is no focus knob (though if you add one, gt_key’s arduino code seems to be able to handle it).

PHD2 will take the image from the webcam attached to your site scope and allow you to specify a particular star in the field. Once you begin tracking, PHD2 looks at how many pixels the star in your image has moved, then send the appropriate commands to move to the ASCOM drivers. These translate that command into whatever command your scope hardware requires. For instance, you might have an autoguiding Orion scope. There’s drivers for all of that stuff. In our case, the Meade LX10 doesn’t have a computer language, so gt_keys chose to use the classic Meade and Autostar 1 command set.

The ASCOM drivers send the message over your USB serial port to the arduino. gt_keys’s code reads in those commands and basically pushes the buttons on the LX-10’s hand controller electrically. The motors on the LX10 move very slow. It is literally a barn door contraption, moving a full 360 degrees in 24 hours, and if you want to drive the telescope the other direction, it just turns the motor off and waits for the earth to spin to the point you want to move to. This means that for you to get good long exposures or to track planets well enough, you have to get a relatively close polar alignment on your scope before you start. More on this in another post.
Hardware Setup:
Firstly, build the schematic as shown. I used a green relay board from Seeed studios.

Secondly, before you flash the firmware to the arduino, you have to change a value to make the hand-held controller to work. This is on line 56. You must change “const int hcontrol = 0;” to “const int hcontrol = 1;” Otherwise you cannot test this thing unless you have it all connected up to the computer, getting ASCOM commands which are generated from the PHD2 program.
Other software and options:
How to guide mount PHD:

As an alternative to PHD Guider 2, (PHD2) you can try AstroTortilla. Though I’ve never tried it,  here’s a tutorial for how to use it.
I have not tried these out, however I’ve seen them recommended several times. Comment and let me know if you love or hate any of these:
AstroImageJ is ImageJ for astronomy. ImageJ is a image processing program for scientific use that’s open sourced, Java-based and encourages lots of plugins, extensions, and macros to be built.

Astronomy.net can help calibrate your images through a web app. Really awesome to see other peoples’ shots as well. You can also have it pick out and name stars in images you upload. It is really cool. There’s a bot on reddit’s astro subreddits that automatically does this and posts the results if you submit images to that reddit. Here’s the bot’s feed  and here’s an “Ask Me anything” AMA with the author.  Oh, and the source code is completely open course too so you can hack on it if you want.