SkyPointer

Description

An open-hardware altazimuth mount with a laser pointer.

The following block diagram shows the current setup:

CAD

The SkyPointer mechanical parts were designed to be easily fabricated with a 3D printer. The cad folder contains the CAD files in Step, STL and FreeCAD formats.

Electronics

Circuit schematics and PCB layout were designed with Kicad. They are stored in the kicad folder.

Arduino

An Arduino Uno board controls two stepper motors (azimuth and elevation) using a CNC shield with some modifications (documentation in progress).

The Arduino firmware is located in a separate repo.

The Python server

The server receives "goto" messages from Stellarium and sends "current position" packets back.

The Stellarium client-server protocol is documented here.

Installing the server in GNU/Linux

Install the required dependencies using your package manager. In Debian/Ubuntu, you can use apt-get like this

$ sudo apt-get install pyqt4-dev-tools python-numpy python-scipy

Now you can install the skypointer package with pip

$ sudo pip install skypointer

Alternatively, you can clone this repo and call setup.py directly from the python folder

$ git clone https://github.com/juanmb/SkyPointer.git
$ cd python
$ python setup.py install

For development, it is strongly recommended to install this package into a virtual environment.

Installing the server in Windows

Using Anaconda:

conda install numpy scipy pyserial pyqt

Now you can install the skypointer package using pip

$ pip install skypointer

Usage

Run skypointer-gui.

Communication with Stellarium

• Start skypointer-gui.

• Check Enable server in the Configuration tab, select a server port number and click Apply.

• Start Stellarium.

• Enable the plugin Telescope control in Stellarium. If it was disabled, you will need to restart Stellarium (only the first time).

• In the configuration window of the Telescope control plugin, add a new telescope and select the option "External software or a remote computer".

• Choose a name and select "Equinox of the date (JNow)".

• Enter the TCP port of the server.

• Close the dialog and press "Connect".

Now you can send the equatorial coordinates of the selected object in Stellarium to the SkyPointer server by pressing Ctrl+1.