Category Archives: Astrophotography

Building a barn door mount, part 4: construction diagrams

Part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this series consider the electrical circuit construction, mathematics behind the drive mechanism, and the control software code. In this post it is time to consider the physical construction of the barn door mount. The logical diagram from part 1 should give a good idea of what the mechanical design will look like, so without further ado lets look at a set of diagrams that reflect the physical construction design that was actually done

First, looking at the top panel of the mount from above. On the right hand side of the panel, a square section was cut out and then re-attached to the main panel with a pair of pivots. These were actually furniture fixing blocks connected by a bolt and with nylon washers to act as spacers  between. In the center of the cut out is an M8 threaded nut, glued in place with epoxy resin, through which the threaded rod will rotate during operation. The alignment of the pivoting hinge and thread nut is crucial to allowing the cut out panel to pivot correctly. On the left hand side of the main panel is the tripod head for attaching the camera to the mount

Top panel from aboveThe tripod head attachment is better seen from the side view of the top panel. The tripod head could not be mounted directly to the main panel, because that would not allow sufficient clearance for the handle to be turned. So two small wooden panels were cut to raise the tripod head a couple of centimetres up from the panel. The tripod head is bolted to one of these small panels with a 3/8″ bolt, and both panels are then bolted down to the main panel using 3 bolts and wing nuts for easy release.

Top panel from side

Moving on to the bottom panel, as viewed from below. Again there is a square cut out panel attached to the main panel with a pair of pivoted bolts. On the left hand side there is a hole in which a 1/4″ captive nut is glued in place from above using epoxy resin. When the tripod is attached it will thus be trying to pull the capture nut through the board which is impossible, thus ensuring a strong connection. This is critical, because the entire weight / torsional load of the barn door mount will be on this captive nut. The pivoting panel has the stepper motor attached to it. The stepper motor is connected to the threaded rod using a flexible coupling nut. To enable the top and bottom panel to get to the 100% closed position, the coupling needs to be recessed somewhat, so the motor is not attached directly to the pivoting panel.

Bottom panel from below

The side view of the bottom panel shows the motor attachment more clearly. Two smaller pieces of wood are used as spacers, to which the stepper motor is attached using M3 machine bolts. These spacers are then attached to the main pivoting panel with a pair of M6 bolts and wing nuts for easy release.

Bottom panel from side

Finally, a length of continuous “piano hinge” is used to connect the top and bottom panels together on the left hand edge. The top and bottom panels are approx 35cm by 18cm each, and using 12mm thick plywood. The pivoting panels are approx 12cm square cut-outs. As noted in previous blog posts the exact dimensions aren’t critical, since the control software can be tuned to rotate at whatever rate is required for the final build dimensions.

The parts list for the construction was

  • Tripod head. (used a cheap Chinese Manfrotto knock-off “Manbilly”)
  • 1/4″ captive nut (to accept primary tripod in bottom panel)
  • 3/8″ bolt (to connect tripod head on top panel)
  • M6 machine screws (x2 for motor panel, x4 for pivot hinges and x3 for tripod head panel)
  • M6 wing-nuts (x2 for motor panel, x3 for tripod head panel)
  • M6 nuts (x4 for pivot hinges)
  • M6 nylon washers (x4 for pivot hinges)
  • M8 threaded rod 35cm length
  • M5xM8 flexible coupling (5mm x 8mm – see part 1)
  • Sheet of plywood (approx 100cm x 50cm x 12mm)

The cost of these parts will vary depending on what you’ve got handy in your toolbox already and whether you have a cheap DIY store locally. The most expensive part was the tripod head, hence why I used a cheap knockoff. The nuts & bolts were just a few pounds and the sheet of plywood was an off-cut from the local DIY store obtained for just a few pounds too.

Now read: part 5, the finished device.

Building a barn door mount, part 2: calculating mount movements

In part 1 of this series, I described how to construct an Arduino based motor controller. This time around it is time to look at the mathematics behind the movement of the mount. As noted previously, the mount will be driven by a threaded rod. As the motor rotates the rod in a nut attached to the camera board, it generates linear motion, however, the board needs to open up with constant angular motion. For simplicity it is intended to construct a type 1 barndoor mount with an isosceles drive rod, as illustrated in the following diagram

Barndoor mount

In the above diagram the threaded rod has length R between the two boards, forming an angle θ. It can readily be seen from the diagram that the isosceles triangle formed by the two boards and the rod can be split into a pair of identical right angle triangles. Basic trigonometry tells us that the sine of the principal angle in a right angle triangle is equal to the ratio between the opposite and hypotenuse:

formula-1

In our diagram above, the principal angle is θ/2, the length of the opposite is R/2 and the hypotenuse is L. Plugging those symbols into the first formula we get:

formula-2

In order to drive the threaded rod, the value we want to calculate is R, so we need to re-arrange the formula to get R on the left hand side:

formula-3

The Arduino isn’t directly controlling the length of the rod though, rather it is controlling its rotation. The length of the rod is the ratio between the number of rotations and the number of threads per centimetre. This gives us a second formula for R

formula-4

Lets substitute this new formula for R, into the previous formula:

formula-5

A few moments ago we mentioned that the quantity we actually control is the rotation of the rod, so the formula must be re-arranged to get the number of rotations on the right hand side:

formula-6

With this formula, we know how many rotations are needed to achieve a given angle between the boards, but what exactly is the angle we need ? The Earth doesn’t take exactly 24 hours to rotate a full 360 degrees, in fact it is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds. This value is known as the sidereal time or rate. With this information we can now define a formula to derive the value for θ at any given time t, since starting operation of the mount from a closed position:

formula-7

Since θ is the value we need, lets re-arrange that formula to get θ on the right hand side

formula-8

This formula for θ can now be substituted into the earlier formula for calculating the rotations of the rod:

formula-10

The final term can be slightly simplified by removing a factor of 2

formula-11

This formula operates in degrees, but when doing calculations in software it is desirable to measure angles in radians. There is a simple formula for converting from degrees to radians:

formula-9

With this information it is now possible to update the formula for calculating rotations to operate in radians by substituting in the conversion formula:

formula-12

A little while ago it was said that the Arduino is controlling the number of rotations of rod. This isn’t strictly true, it is in fact controlling the number of steps of the motor. A motor will have a certain number of steps it can do in one rotation, which gives a step size in degrees.  The formula for calculating rotations can thus be adapted to calculate the number of steps

formula-13

This is our last formula and it has 4 variables to be filled in with accurate values

  • stepsize: the stepper motor used in the electronics does 200 steps per rotation giving a step size of 1.8. This is a common size for this type of stepper motor. Another typical size is 64 steps per rotation.
  • threads.per.cm: a standard M8 threaded rod will have 10 threads per centimetre, other rods may vary.
  • L: this is the length of the base board between the hinge and the centre of the threaded rod. This has to be precisely measured after construction is complete
  • siderealtime: 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds, or more simply 86164.0419 seconds

This formula could be executed directly on the Arduino board, but a sine calculation is somewhat heavy for the microcontroller. Realistically the mount isn’t going to be doing exposures of longer than 2-3 hours. It is fairly trivial to thus this formula and calculate the required number of rotations for each minute of each hours and produce a 180 entry table. The Arduino then merely has to keep track of time and do a trivial table lookup to determine the rotation rate. An algorithm for doing this will be the subject of a later blog post.

Now read: part 3, drive control software

Building a barn door mount, part 1: arduino stepper motor control

Serious astronomical imaging requires an equatorial mount for the camera / telescope, which tracks the rotation of the earth for anywhere between 5 minutes and several hours. Commercially available mount options have a starting price of several hundred pounds and range up to thousands. As a result many amateur astro-photographers choose the DIY option, building what’s commonly known as a “barn door mount“. At their simplest, they consist of two parallel planks of wood hinged at one side, with a threaded rod which is manually turned once a minute to gradually open the hinge at a rate which matches the speed of rotation of the Earth.

They are very simple to build, but the pain point should be clear from the end of the previous sentence – you need to control the dimensions such that one rotation of the threaded rod, causes the hinge to open at precisely the right rate. This isn’t as hard as it sounds for short exposures (10-15 minutes) but as the desired exposure time goes up the errors quickly spiral out of control. Some of the error is caused by construction inaccuracies but the bigger part is due to the inherent design decision to produce angular motion (opening hinge) from linear motion (rotating threaded rod). The latter is commonly referred to as the tangent error.

There are various more complicated barn door designs which use 3 pieces of wood to eliminate the tangent errors. Sadly the more complicated designs also increase the mechanical errors due to construction inaccuracies. The easy solution to this problem is to use a programmable microcontroller to drive the mount, allowing arbitrary errors to be corrected in software. When you need a cheap, low power microcontroller, the first option that comes to mind is an Arduino. A little bit of searching on google revealed someone who had built a barn door controlled by an Arduino Uno and a stepper motor. Even better, they provided a sketch of their circuit diagram for wiring it up.

Cost being king, I headed over to eBay to source the big ticket parts, and a maplin store for a few odds & ends I wanted to see in person before purchase. On the list were

Thus the total cost for the electronics was £46.21, a little bit higher than I was originally hoping for. I could have reduced it by going for one of the lower spec stepper motors which are bundled with a driver circuit board. This would have cut approx £12.00 off the cost, but I was not confident it would have sufficient torque for direct drive of the threaded rod, so I went for the sure bet. A pound or two could have been shaved off the cost of switches / power jack too, by sourcing from eBay instead of maplin. IOW it is probably possible to get the parts for about £30-35 if you really find the bargains. Before assembly the parts are laid out

Barndoor electronic parts

In addition to the project parts, you’ll need a few workshop items including a multi-meter, soldering iron, helping hands, wire cutters/strippers and 3A x 12v regulated bench power supply.

After looking at the previously mentioned circuit diagram, I decided to make one slight variation in the use of switches. I discarded the separate power switch, and used all three prongs from one of the switches to toggle between forward/stopped/backward. Thus the aim was to construct the following circuit diagram from the parts:

Barndoor circuit

The Arduino is capable of being powered from the USB port, the on board DC jack, or the VIN pin. While the EasyDriver can take a 5v line from the Arduino board, this is only suitable for driving the electronics, not the stepper motor which needs much higher current than the Arduino is capable of supplying. Thus the decision was made to take a 12V supply from a off-board 2.1mmx5mm DC jack, to the VIN pin on the Arduino and M+ pin on the EasyDriver. The DC jack size was chosen to match that used on the Celestron NexStar telescope mounts, and so was wired center-positive.

The EasyDriver needs a minimum of two control signals, one to trigger a motor step and the other to set the direction of rotation. Thus the Step and Dir pins on the EasyDriver board were connected to the digital pins 8 and 9 on the Arduino. The EasyDriver defaults to 8-point microstepping. If use of full steps were required, the MS1 and MS2 pins could be connected to further digital pins on the Arduino. For the barn door mount though, the rate of rotation is so slow that 8-point microstepping is more than OK.

The two switches are going to be used to provide control parameters to the software running on the Arduino. The ON/OFF/ON switch is going to be used to switch the motion of the motor between clockwise, stopped and anti-clockwise. The ON/ON switch is going to be used to switch between automatic sidereal matched speed control and manual fast speed. For wiring, we effectively have a 1K Ohm resistor between the 5V output pin and an analogue pin. The switch is used to short this link out to ground. Toggling the switch thus toggles the analogue pin high/low.

The final piece of wiring is connecting the stepper motor wires to the EasyDriver. The ordering of the wires is absolutely critical. The stepper motor has two separate coils / phases, and 4 coloured wires coming out of it. Each pair of wires corresponds to one of the phases. The key is determining which wires match which phase and the polarity. Fortunately the stepper motor had a model number on it, allowing the data sheet to be located via google. The data sheet shows that one phase is connected to the black + green wires, while the other phase is connected to the red + blue wires. So the EasyDriver motor pins are wired up in the order black, green, red, blue. Again, this order is absolutely critical to get right – mixing up the polarity between the two coils will result in a motor which won’t turn. Likewise, not matching up wires within a phase will result in a motor which won’t turn. It is also NOT SAFE to use trial and error to test the motor while the EasyDriver is active. Detaching the motor wires while the EasyDriver is active will likely result in a burnt-out EasyDriver. Find the data sheet and get it right first time.

After a hour or two cutting and soldering wires the circuit was complete. To test it requires creation of a simple test program in the Arduino IDE. For this test I’d used the AccelStepper library instead of the Stepper library that is normally used, because the AccelStepper is more flexible to use.

#include <AccelStepper.h>

int debug = 0;

int dgPinStep = 8;
int dgPinDirection = 9;

int anPinForeward = 4;
int anPinBackward = 5;
int anPinSpeed = 3;

AccelStepper stepper(AccelStepper::DRIVER, dgPinStep, dgPinDirection);

void setup() {
  pinMode(anPinForeward,  OUTPUT);
  pinMode(anPinBackward,  OUTPUT);  
  pinMode(anPinSpeed,  OUTPUT);  

  stepper.setMaxSpeed(3000);

  if (debug) {
    Serial.begin(9600);
  }
}

void loop() {
  int valForeward = analogRead(anPinForeward);
  int valBackward = analogRead(anPinBackward);
  int valSpeed = analogRead(anPinSpeed);
  int run = 0;

  if (debug) {
    Serial.print("Foreward: ");
    Serial.print(valForeward);
    Serial.print(" Backward: ");
    Serial.print(valBackward);
    Serial.print(" Speed: ");
    Serial.println(valSpeed);
  }
  if (valForeward < 5) {
    if (valSpeed < 5) {
      stepper.setSpeed(200);
    } else {
      stepper.setSpeed(2000);
    }
    run = 1;
  } else if (valBackward < 5) {
    if (valSpeed < 5) {
      stepper.setSpeed(-200);
    } else {
      stepper.setSpeed(-2000);
    }
    run = 1;
  } else {
    run = 0;
  }

  if (run) {
    stepper.runSpeed();
  } else {
    stepper.stop();
  }
}

After compiling and uploading to the Arduino over USB, the program will start running immediately. If you’re not confident that the switch pins are connected in the right order the “debug” variable can be set to 1, which will let you watch the levels via the IDE’s serial console as the switches are toggled. Just remember to turn off debugging again afterwards because the println calls seriously slow down the program to the point that it is unusable in the real world. The video shows toggling the motion switch between forward/off/backward and the speed switch between slow/fast (sidereal rate is not implemented in the test program)

With everything working, all the remains is to house it in the plastic case. This required drilling a few holes for the switches and DC hack, and carving out a hole with a file for the USB port and carving a channel for the motor wires. With the electronics complete, the next phases are to build the mechanical side of the mount and then do the maths calculations and software programming necessary to track the earth’s rotation accurately. These will follow as separate blog posts in the coming days or weeks.

Now read: part 2, calculating mount movements