Hello everyone,
I'm Paul from Gloucestershire. Why am I here? I find my Nexstar 4SE quite frustrating when it asks me to find calibration stars through my house, or through the tree at the bottom of our garden!
The AstroEQ design of a simple interface to steppers on a decent mount is very appealing, also along with the excellent ASCOM/EQMOD software the whole system does everything I wish the Nexstar would do.
My plans are a good mount; initially the EQ3-2 looked good but I'm leaning towards the EQ5. I want to take "nice" pictures of the planets and interesting deep sky objects, print and mount them in frames. Most likely I'll be under the watchful eye of my daughter who is a keen artist.
I bought an Arduino Mega clone for £9, installed AstroEQ, the lights flash and EQMOD talks to it - joy.
Regarding motor drivers I've seen people having problems with weaker NEMA 17 motors stalling, so I plan to go with something based on the Toshiba TB6600HG Stepper Motor Driver which can cope with NEMA 17, 24 and 34 motors. The maximum of 50V and 5A might be overkill, but the Toshiba chips are very popular with CNCs that have similar demands on accuracy and the difficulty of accelerating a large mass. [I develop software in the 3D CAD/CAM business].
The TB6600 supports 1/16th stepping, current limits from 0.2A to 5A and many useful options.
There are TB6600 drivers with good heatsinks flooding out of China around the £6 to £15 mark, not much different to the Arduino Mega footprint, but 35mm thick and needing free air around the heatsink. See attachments. That implies the motor drivers may have to be in their own box close to the AstroEQ box - but Lego flexibility is at the heart of this system.
cheers
Paul
PS: I've ordered 2 drivers for £11 each on ebay, from a London supplier.
