február 2025 Csillagtúra

I took an ESP32 board, with a camera and LCD, and turned it into an autoguiding component for my spectroheliograph setup. Below’s the source code — before you judge it, think about it as an as-is release, half of it written while recording the Sun itself, mostly for fun. Some day in the future I may clean it up. PS: form9 from the printscreen got a decent title.

Note that, for this particular setup featured here:

the ESP32 / OV2640 / ST7789 development board in the picture doesn’t have remaining free pins (maybe if the SPI/I2C buses are tapped into). My solution reports the center of gravity through the serial port.
the EQ3 hand controller originally doesn’t have an ST4 connector

Both limitations from above have been overcome in my particular setup: I rebuilt the EQ3’s controller from the ground up, only the stepper motors are from factory, and it includes a special spectroheliograph scan mode. Both the autoguider and the otherwise standalone embedded device EQ3 controller connect to a desktop app, to the The Soapbox MountPusher Guider assembly. Thus the control is centralized there and Sharpcap, camera cooling, autoguiding etc are all orchestrated in a concert. See the family portrait below.