RedShift

Telescope movement controll firmware for amateur telescope makers

RedShift is a program made for ESP8266 connected to two stepper motors that controll telescope azimuth and altitude. It hosts web server with a web app that allows to control your telescope using a web browser.

Prerequisites

• Arduino IDE https://www.arduino.cc/en/software (configured to work with ESP8266 board https://randomnerdtutorials.com/how-to-install-esp8266-board-arduino-ide/ )

• ESP8266WiFi library instaled via arduino IDE tools->Manage Libraries

• ESPAsyncTCP https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncTCP

• ESPAsyncWebServer https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer/

• AsyncElegantOTA https://github.com/ayushsharma82/AsyncElegantOTA

• LittleFS https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-esp8266littlefs-plugin/

• Telescope with AltAz or Dobson mount and stepper motors

Instructions

Example for wiring when using NodeMcu and ULN2003 stepper motor drivers is given here

Roadmap

Project is accepting contributions, contact me at red.shift.tracker-at-gmail.com

Since RedShift is a project in progress, following features are planned for implementation:

• Manual movement: have a simple web interface that can be used as a joystick to controll movement <- Currently here
• Tracking: after telesope is moved to the desired position, it continues to move to compensate for Earth rotation
• Aiming: allows user to choose an object from the catalogue and automaticaly aim to it.
• Solar system objects: using JPL Horizons API https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

Thanks

Much of the work was derived from projects:

• https://randomnerdtutorials.com/stepper-motor-esp8266-websocket/
• https://github.com/google/web-starter-kit
• https://www.instructables.com/Making-a-Joystick-With-HTML-pure-JavaScript/
• http://eeshop.unl.edu/pdf/Stepper+Driver.pdf

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