Welcome to the Ephemeris Project
A Retrofit Design for LX200 (and Emulated) Mounts
What
The Ephemeris Project is determined to find a fast, cheap, and good way to reposition 802.11 family antennas on demand.
A good way to do that is to get a Meade LX200 (or similar spec) telescope, toss the telescope, and then hook the base
into your PC via the attached RS-232 port. There is quite a bit of free software out there to control your antenna base at that point.
The advantage of these packages is that they already know not to do things like tie up your RS-232 cable. The bad part is that
they are designed for star-tracking, not antenna-pointing so some trickery must be employed at some point. Luckily for me, my favorite coffee shop is in the direct LOS of the constellation
Leo this time of year... so if I tell my base station that I am situated in Perth, Australia I can get a sub-horizontal azimuth.
Phase I : Get a base working that will allow us to manually reposition an antenna on an ad hoc basis. This begs the question; if I can communicate to my PC to
move the antenna then why do I need 802.11? I am looking into some unique fixes for this like the digitalsky voice package.
Phase II : Get a base working automatically, based on either timed repositionings or remote interaction.
Phase III : Offer antenna focus as well as 3-D positioning.
Phase IV : Get away from telescope bases.
Why
Currently my burg doesn't have "complete" wireless Internet coverage so I have to bring my own to many of the places I frequent. I can either set an antenna lighting up my usual haunts or figure out a way to point an antenna that will either follow me or
get there before I need to use it.
Telescopes with LX200 emulated mode.
Meade LX200 and ETX family
Losmandy-Gemini mounts
Astro-Physics mounts
Software Hacking so far.
Meade packages
There are some interesting projects on stepper motor control and RS-232 communications at
sourceforge but I was looking for something I can start working with immediately.
Hardware Hacking so far.
Doc. G has some good info on the inner workings of the LX200.