Exactly! I pretty much “get it” but watch, mostly, for the pure perseverance of it. The tech is fun, but the problem-solving, with the “no worries, see what happens, stick-to-it-ivness” is great.
He’s got a lot more patience than I do. He keeps saying this annoying problem, that annoying problem, yet shows not a hint of annoyance. I would have already been throwing things around, getting mad, cussing. Kudos to you sir!
Remember that that movie where the guy wanted to come back to earth from mars And he came across a Russia ship with a bear 🐻 in the program 😂 The way it spoke And the American put python on it I think ? It was a great movie
@@4muhammedsiraaji71if it was back in the 90s, that'd be easy, but it's 2024 unfortunately and doing that is all but impossible, unless you are using one of the very precious few remaining analog coax services.
Sorry buddy, ever since DTV / DISH went digital, they have encoded their transmissions, and all the boxes are designed to take sat encryption updates. The good old days of paying a DTV technician under the table for a decoder are gone. Besides the'res nothing good on TV anyway. @@4muhammedsiraaji71
When it's starting and grinding the gears, I think it's doing that because the current limit feed back is set to high. If their is any adjustability for it, adjusting it down may stop the over torquing issue.
You aren't grinding any gears, the grinding noise you are hearing is just the stepper motors losing steps. This is actually a pretty common way for motion control systems w/o feedback sensors to find 'home'. The stepper motors will skip steps at torque levels far below the point where it would cause damage to belts or gears, making it a cost effective (although scary sounding) way to home a system. Some/older 3D (and 2D) printers do this, as do CD/DVD drive readers, some flatbed scanners, etc. If you are losing steps/position while the unit is operating, that is likely a result of moving the system too fast. Stepper motors have a torque curve, and at high speeds they have a high chance of skipping.
Your cheesy telephone cable may be the culprit. Higher bit-rates require better cables -- even for these "glacial by todays network standards" speeds. Back when I was a young pup, we ran RS-232 everywhere -- because you had terminals and a central computer. Getting things to work above 9600BPS required better cabling--particularly for longer cabling.
I haven't had time to sign up for Discord, too distracted with all the other chat apps! Email is probably the easiest, gabe (at) saveitforparts (dot com).
Wavelength and Frequency are inverse, so a higher frequency has smaller waves, and uses smaller antennas. CB radio is relatively low frequency (27mhz), so a typical CB antenna is much longer than a UHF (400mhz) antenna. TV satellites are usually around 12ghz (Microwave frequencies), so the antennas can be very small and might not work for lower frequencies with larger wavelengths. There's some more info here:www.antennadirect.com.au/digital-antennas-smaller/ and here: www.mobilemark.com/engineering/antenna-terminology-defined/
@@saveitforparts Ah, yeah, I should have realised that! Makes complete sense. For some reason, I was thinking you said the shorter wavelength was bigger, but you did say the lower frequency (my bad). I've saved those pages, so I can read them properly later. Thanks for the reply! I like watching you fiddle and learn. I understand soundwaves (I have a degree) but not the electromagnetic sort! Ooh I wonder if alien eyes that see lower wavelengths would be larger? Maybe not. They aren't antennas, lol. Anyway thanks again!
Maybe one of the dipswitches will turn off that self calibration / setellite search mode. If it needs maintainance or some work inside after commissioning, it would be logical for the operator to turn off the feature before powering it up.
Love your videos. Because of you i bought a RTL-SDR 😀 I would recommend putting a raspberry there and trash the original controller. Those stepper can be better controlled directly. With this setup you also can add switch-endstops.
14:40 - I’d suggest marking the hard limits and from those, find the midpoint. Then use that midpoint for your initial aim. Really interesting project, always useful to have a real world problem to get your teeth into. Good to see your code too, gives an idea of how you’re moving the dish. I’m not as good with Python as you are but I’m getting better.
I'm not great at Python either, and I'm sure there are cleaner and more elegant ways of doing most of these routines. Hopefully no one's using my code as a learning example 😅
@@saveitforparts - It only matters if you’re working as part of a larger team, which you aren’t. Any decent coder can read your code - even I know what you’re doing line by line.
The L-band patch behind what amounts to a chunk of circular-waveguide will NOT work very well at all. The feedpoint "plumbing" on these dishes is also quite specialized to a particular range of wavelengths -- in the case of these Tailgater type dishes, that's Ku-band, at 11-12GHz, as opposed to the 1.5GHz you're trying for. I'd get stick with the original LNB, and tap into the RF goop at some appropriate point. The card appears to have a multi-output power supply--one of those outputs will be supplying 11-15V for the LNB.
I find your satellite projects very interesting. It's nice that the cat has made a valuable contribution to the project. I hope you find a solution to the problem. I love Python; it's a very powerful language. I use it on the Raspberry Pi Nano.
The horrible noise when it hits the limits may not be destructive, it's probably just the stepper skipping steps which shouldn't cause any damage. If the belt is skipping them it probably needs to be tensioned more.
i really am mind blown on how you can figure out how to do things like this, if a satellite was put in front of me and i had to make something of it i would be lost!! I really do enjoy watching your content although most of it i dont understand, but it does not matter!
17:46 Does the include receiver have an LNB output, sometimes called "loop out", for chaining a second receiver to use a single dish? If so, you may be able to use the down-converted signal without needing a bias-T...
Based on the frequency I'm tuned to, and the orbital paths of the satellites that use that frequency. Iridium uses a Polar orbit that looks like a north-south line from the ground. GPS and other navigation satellites are in a higher orbit and look like a diagonal or curving line from the ground. N2yo.com is a good website for plotting orbital ground tracks, and sites like whatsin.space/ are good for visualizing 3D orbits.
I bought one of these for dirt cheap off ebay with a broken power port years ago. I never had time to really hook anything up to it, but knowing that port has RS485 on it is neat! I'm going to have to dig it up.
Your bodge of usb to serial to rs485 to rj11 breakout is both glorious and also likely to be a source of headaches. Usb to serial adapters are incredibly fickle, and can be huge sources of headaches. I spent a while working with PLCs which were typically programmed over serial (or rs485, sometimes even rs485 through an rj11 jack like you've got) and the problem was invariably that the PLC hated the usb to serial adapter.
Nice work! You've had more patience with the janky controller board that I would have ever had. I would recommend ditching the existing controller and just replacing it with a raspi or something. The vast majority of the functionality of the original board was in handling the RF signal and you're not taking advantage of that and just using it as a very contentious stepper motor controller. If you rolled your own stepper controller you could easily add some rotary encoders and end stops. You could also add a GPS module, an accelerometer and cheap compass module to the base so the unit can automagically handle rough alignment and to point the dish in the approximate direction of a satellite before using RF strength to home in on a signal.
A suggestion: maybe put a 6DoF or 9DoF IMU on the dish or feed horn, as you can then get azimuth from the B field, and altitude from the accelerometer. That might make for better output than trusting the open loop control on the stepper motors. Great work! Also, I used to live up in Roseville, and was a regular over at Ax-Man. Tell 'em Pete says hi when you next stop in!
From this angle, it looks like you got in a fight with the satellite, and you lost(messy hair, beard patch missing, etc.). Now you're throwing in the towel, lol..... 27:00
In terms of stepper control maybe an old 3d printer board would come in handy... serial / easy interface for steppers / easy hardware config for end stops. Track that sat with Gcode! :-) Thanks for the video SIFP always a treat!
You can enable the Serial ports on the computer in BIIS. Ensure the cable internally is connected to the motherboard. Usually Baud rate can be set in the terminal device. Serial will ONLY work at the Baud rate set in the terminal.
Some ware in the programing is a command for cable unwrap. As the cables are going through the center of the azimuth movement. Ad for limmit testing. The satellite dishes used to have limit switches. All have been removed and just bump against end stop a couple times and calls that zero.
Hey I'm an instant subscriber this guy's content is in my wheelhouse.....love it.😊 I don't know how I went this long without knowing about this channel.... at last you've arrived😂
10:38 "That still sounds terrible to me, there there has to be a better way to know the drive limit than just slamming into it and grinding the gears like that" - I liked it ! It reminded me of the grunts and grinds sounds coming out an old Apple ][ floppy disk drive.
@10:35 ....look into a PID circuit to control the motor. PID Proportional Integral Derivative, used commonly to control large robotic arms to quickly, efficiently, accurately, and SAFELY for movement.
if ur serial connection keeps fn up consistently its usually the serial converter, you could fairly easily adapt an FTDI programmer for that terminal block to rj 45 cable u had
You should consider using Onstep (open source telescope stepper controller) to drive the steppers. It's pretty simple to make, and is already designed to control steppers to go to celestial coordinates. Then you could use an INDI telescope driver to connect and script whatever you felt like. Dump the onboard control entirely. You'd need to get the ratio of the reduction from those pulleys, the type of stepper motor etc. It supports limit switches, and microstepping also, so the accuarcy would probably be far superior to the built on system since it's meant for taking pictures through telescopes through long focal lengths.
I like the longer video personally, even if the end result isn't considered a "success." Generally not really into radio telescopes persay, but anything RF is generally an interest of mine. These little dishes are really pretty neat honestly.
You need to explore the world in circuit debuggers! ICDs are a lot of fun, you don't necessarily have to know programming language. A lot of it is very similar to what you've been doing elsewhere.
Brother, I know this isn't the end of the video, and the video came out a month ago, but I saw some settings labeled "detect stall" or something similar. I'd bet that's to detect when the motors have started grinding. At 15:07 number 107 is labeled "El Stall Detect" which should logically be the setting for the detection threshold of the elevation motor? Maybe?
If those stepper motors are anything like the intelligent lighting i used to work with back when I was a DJ/light tech at a major nightclub, there's probably position sensors strategically placed as markers for the motors. A lot of times I only had to clean the sensors for them to work properly.
Have you ever screwed around with a phased array antenna? Also, with so many spare tailgater antennas, maybe you could repurpose them by fashioning some other tool on top like a water hose to automatically spray plants in a controlled pattern, or something crazy ,like a guided model rocket launcher.
The stronger signal through the rotation is RFI and the serial on the back of your PC is turned on in the BIOS but RS485 is 12V which is a problem as the normal voltage for RS232 is like 5V
I always wonder if the dish is big enough for HRPT receiving, the signal would be a lot stronger than GOES satellites. That way you can made an automated NOAA/METEOR/METOP HRPT receiver that is weatherproof :)
@@saveitforparts may want to look into the "wisper" wspr mode radio clock sync tech for such a task? Also a very fast/wide network switch synced helps.
I believe that rain pan is the rain cover for a roof exhaust fan. I have one just like it. IBM did consulting for HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) 9000.
Can I have your brain? 😅 when I started visual studio “ 2 weeks late for the semester “ I was completely lost! Can you tell me how to use Alice to message “hello world” to the aliens? lol great job you are a uniquely intelligent person and I admire that! Great video thank you
I actually don't remember much from my programming classes! I remember more from messing with Applesoft BASIC back in the 90's, even though real programmers all say that's a terrible language to learn 😂
that scanning issue sounds like a backlash issue with your horizontal scan axis belt. it looks pretty loose, and might need some tensioning to cut down on backlash
How about scanning elevation then move over one degree then scan elevation again and so on. In this way your left pan vs your right pan won’t skew the image. Also scan at Hydrogen Line and map the Milky Way. You could also do this with a bigger dish incrementing the vertical only movement using the earth rotation to move the dish?
If you look at the data sheet for the stepper motor drivers TMC294A it has built in Stall detection and homing. That’s why there are no home bc switches on the gimbal
You haven't been able to get obs working on linux? what distro are you using? there should be a pre-built binary in almost every flavor, are you having graphics driver issues? love these satellite projects! They're super interesting.
Quite possibly driver or system issues. I'm using a 2nd-hand computer that has some other problems. It works really well for video editing but is a little flaky for certain other things.
There's no need for a separate screen recording software. VLC media player offers a feature that allows you to capture and save your screen output directly to a file.
@saveitforparts You have inspired me to make my own unit. Cheers ! I'm wondering if I could mount multiple Satellite Receiver Antennas on a Single Dish and have a Pan - Tilt Setup on my roof for me never to touch again :) and then sit at my computer and do all the coding and scanning....
Winegard is a company that makes a lot of components used in motorhomes and campers. From being a catv installer for way to long Id bet the reason you see a lot of it for free is not because the winegard equipment is bad but the other components wired through the camper/motorhome build were done during the manufacturing process and used cheap twist on connectors and cheap splitters causing issues that could be corrected. Most campgrounds now wired for cable give the alternative to ditch the winegard sat equipment.
I don't have the slightest clue what you are doing, but i really enjoy watching you do whatever it is your doing.
Me to 😊
Exactly! I pretty much “get it” but watch, mostly, for the pure perseverance of it. The tech is fun, but the problem-solving, with the “no worries, see what happens, stick-to-it-ivness” is great.
🤣🤣🤣
He’s got a lot more patience than I do. He keeps saying this annoying problem, that annoying problem, yet shows not a hint of annoyance. I would have already been throwing things around, getting mad, cussing. Kudos to you sir!
"Just one more satelite dish bros... I promise its the last one. Just one more. One more satelite dish.. just one more. I only need one more.."
I mean the more you have, the higher resolution for “The Very Small Array”, no?
@@ericlotze7724 Just one more satelite dish...
@@ericlotze7724 "Just one more dish..."
We love recreational python coding
I turned a robot head on mars with python
🐍
Strangely was able to download gear files from limewire 😂❤❤❤🥹
Remember that that movie where the guy wanted to come back to earth from mars
And he came across a Russia ship with a bear 🐻 in the program 😂
The way it spoke
And the American put python on it I think ? It was a great movie
Yes I moved a robot 🤖 head on mars with python 🐍
RUclips commands helped 😆
me too.. literally
HAL usually refers to the Hardware Abstraction Layer... but hey... the HAL9000 has the utmost enthusiasm for the mission, so that works too!
Hal was a reference to IBM, just one letter up in the alphabet. H-I, A-B, L-M.
you called
@@Azazeal777 nice!
The panic of plugging in a serial port into a moving assembly is... fun :) Another phenomenal video!
I don't understand half of what he's doing but it's the professionaly winging it that has me hooked.
Also: what was the cencored.png?👀
Ha, it's an overlay for editing, in case I have something too dumb or sketchy. Mostly a joke, I forget when I last used it.
Easily one of the coolest channels I've ever come across. I love the scripting too.
❤me too. Awesome channel!
I like the filming of the screen, it fits the vibe of the channel better lol
I think it's as simple as the whole waveguide is just the wrong size for L-band.
Fascinating experiment, mate. Thanks for the great content.
You could use a rotary encoder to show the exact position of the dish and use that as error correction.
Hey.. I have a challenge could you be having a solution to it and help me out. I want to learn how to hack pay tv and watch channels free of charge
@@4muhammedsiraaji71 Most modern satellite tv is encrypted and most people don't have that kind of tech or skill to be able to crack it.
@@4muhammedsiraaji71if it was back in the 90s, that'd be easy, but it's 2024 unfortunately and doing that is all but impossible, unless you are using one of the very precious few remaining analog coax services.
Sorry buddy, ever since DTV / DISH went digital, they have encoded their transmissions, and all the boxes are designed to take sat encryption updates. The good old days of paying a DTV technician under the table for a decoder are gone. Besides the'res nothing good on TV anyway. @@4muhammedsiraaji71
@@4muhammedsiraaji71skull
Amazing work for a backyard enthusiast! Love watching your projects develop. Love from NZ
Great how you back engineered it. Loved the "Cat Scanner" Your Cat loves helping you out all of the time.
Was the serial port on the Linux server possibly just disabled in the BIOS? I love the huge range of tech and scripting you cover on this channel BTW!
Could be, I never checked that!
This was my first thought
When it's starting and grinding the gears, I think it's doing that because the current limit feed back is set to high. If their is any adjustability for it, adjusting it down may stop the over torquing issue.
Don't give up, this is one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while!
You aren't grinding any gears, the grinding noise you are hearing is just the stepper motors losing steps. This is actually a pretty common way for motion control systems w/o feedback sensors to find 'home'. The stepper motors will skip steps at torque levels far below the point where it would cause damage to belts or gears, making it a cost effective (although scary sounding) way to home a system. Some/older 3D (and 2D) printers do this, as do CD/DVD drive readers, some flatbed scanners, etc. If you are losing steps/position while the unit is operating, that is likely a result of moving the system too fast. Stepper motors have a torque curve, and at high speeds they have a high chance of skipping.
I agree, it sounds terrible, but there is actually no physical contact being made. Just a vibration of the shaft/motor through the magnetic fields.
Your cheesy telephone cable may be the culprit. Higher bit-rates require better cables -- even for these "glacial by todays network standards" speeds. Back when I was a young pup, we ran RS-232 everywhere -- because you had terminals and a central computer. Getting things to work above 9600BPS required better cabling--particularly for longer cabling.
Hands down one of my favourite channels.
The programmer interface Is JTAG. Used in FPGA and ARM processors
there is a gigantic base of people that love breaking down this low level especially satellite stuff. we can donate things to you. or at least i can.
What kinda stuff? I'm looking to donate a couple broken VuQube dishes to someone myself, just to free up garage space 😅
@@saveitforparts is there a discord or something we can share info?
I'd love to get my hands on one of these that I can hack up! I might need to source locally though.
@@kb9mtd-aaronwebb if in USA u can have some
I haven't had time to sign up for Discord, too distracted with all the other chat apps! Email is probably the easiest, gabe (at) saveitforparts (dot com).
Fantastic. Such a great video. Watched the desert trip series with my bro. Great content. Got him interested in the sky!
@19:50 I'm a complete radio noob; Why do you need larger receivers for a shorter wavelength? Can somebody explain that to me, please?
Wavelength and Frequency are inverse, so a higher frequency has smaller waves, and uses smaller antennas. CB radio is relatively low frequency (27mhz), so a typical CB antenna is much longer than a UHF (400mhz) antenna. TV satellites are usually around 12ghz (Microwave frequencies), so the antennas can be very small and might not work for lower frequencies with larger wavelengths. There's some more info here:www.antennadirect.com.au/digital-antennas-smaller/ and here: www.mobilemark.com/engineering/antenna-terminology-defined/
@@saveitforparts Ah, yeah, I should have realised that! Makes complete sense. For some reason, I was thinking you said the shorter wavelength was bigger, but you did say the lower frequency (my bad). I've saved those pages, so I can read them properly later. Thanks for the reply! I like watching you fiddle and learn. I understand soundwaves (I have a degree) but not the electromagnetic sort! Ooh I wonder if alien eyes that see lower wavelengths would be larger? Maybe not. They aren't antennas, lol. Anyway thanks again!
Maybe one of the dipswitches will turn off that self calibration / setellite search mode. If it needs maintainance or some work inside after commissioning, it would be logical for the operator to turn off the feature before powering it up.
Love your videos. Because of you i bought a RTL-SDR 😀 I would recommend putting a raspberry there and trash the original controller. Those stepper can be better controlled directly. With this setup you also can add switch-endstops.
I really enjoy your videos! Your determination is inspiring!
14:40 - I’d suggest marking the hard limits and from those, find the midpoint. Then use that midpoint for your initial aim.
Really interesting project, always useful to have a real world problem to get your teeth into. Good to see your code too, gives an idea of how you’re moving the dish. I’m not as good with Python as you are but I’m getting better.
I'm not great at Python either, and I'm sure there are cleaner and more elegant ways of doing most of these routines. Hopefully no one's using my code as a learning example 😅
@@saveitforparts - It only matters if you’re working as part of a larger team, which you aren’t. Any decent coder can read your code - even I know what you’re doing line by line.
The L-band patch behind what amounts to a chunk of circular-waveguide will NOT work very well at all. The feedpoint "plumbing" on these dishes is also quite specialized to a particular range of wavelengths -- in the case of these Tailgater type dishes, that's Ku-band, at 11-12GHz, as opposed to the 1.5GHz you're trying for. I'd get stick with the original LNB, and tap into the RF goop at some appropriate point. The card appears to have a multi-output power supply--one of those outputs will be supplying 11-15V for the LNB.
I have no idea what was happening here, but I enjoyed it immensely...
I find your satellite projects very interesting. It's nice that the cat has made a valuable contribution to the project. I hope you find a solution to the problem. I love Python; it's a very powerful language. I use it on the Raspberry Pi Nano.
Man it's beautiful to see how excited while working with this.
Keep it up! :)
I hereby declare you the actual coolest person on RUclips.
Dude, your channel and content is the absolute coolest. Greetings from the Twin Cities!
The horrible noise when it hits the limits may not be destructive, it's probably just the stepper skipping steps which shouldn't cause any damage. If the belt is skipping them it probably needs to be tensioned more.
i really am mind blown on how you can figure out how to do things like this, if a satellite was put in front of me and i had to make something of it i would be lost!! I really do enjoy watching your content although most of it i dont understand, but it does not matter!
17:46 Does the include receiver have an LNB output, sometimes called "loop out", for chaining a second receiver to use a single dish? If so, you may be able to use the down-converted signal without needing a bias-T...
The Winegard Company is in my hometown of Burlington Iowa.
The Milk Crate Pedestal Mount is the Best.... True DIY at Heart. Very Fun - Very Informative. Good for you...
Well now that I know it can be done, I simply must make a radio telescope!
@26:30 how do you know what satellites you're viewing?
Based on the frequency I'm tuned to, and the orbital paths of the satellites that use that frequency. Iridium uses a Polar orbit that looks like a north-south line from the ground. GPS and other navigation satellites are in a higher orbit and look like a diagonal or curving line from the ground. N2yo.com is a good website for plotting orbital ground tracks, and sites like whatsin.space/ are good for visualizing 3D orbits.
@@saveitforparts Thanks. It looks awesome to a noob lol. I might try it one day.
I love RUclips videos like these... really feeds my Layman's curiosity.😊
First time viewing your stuff. I liked and subscribed not only because it's interesting, but because of your StarGate SG1 dvds
I bought one of these for dirt cheap off ebay with a broken power port years ago. I never had time to really hook anything up to it, but knowing that port has RS485 on it is neat! I'm going to have to dig it up.
I was surprised when it rained here around Christmas too (I'm in central MN). At least it snowed recently so it seems more like winter.
love your content, i would love to see a video about the basic tools and software you need to start hacking like this
Damned if I know, I bought a $15 Software Defined Radio in 2020 and it just snowballed from there😅
great effort my man! wish I had someone like you in my area to do sat projects like this with
Your bodge of usb to serial to rs485 to rj11 breakout is both glorious and also likely to be a source of headaches. Usb to serial adapters are incredibly fickle, and can be huge sources of headaches.
I spent a while working with PLCs which were typically programmed over serial (or rs485, sometimes even rs485 through an rj11 jack like you've got) and the problem was invariably that the PLC hated the usb to serial adapter.
16:47 had me dying ☠️ cat scan😂😂😂
i have not one clue what you are talking about. but i love it. i always get hooked on your videos
At 2:14 it is JTAG interface which can help debugging and dumping/writing flash memory.
Nice work! You've had more patience with the janky controller board that I would have ever had. I would recommend ditching the existing controller and just replacing it with a raspi or something. The vast majority of the functionality of the original board was in handling the RF signal and you're not taking advantage of that and just using it as a very contentious stepper motor controller. If you rolled your own stepper controller you could easily add some rotary encoders and end stops. You could also add a GPS module, an accelerometer and cheap compass module to the base so the unit can automagically handle rough alignment and to point the dish in the approximate direction of a satellite before using RF strength to home in on a signal.
4:13 Couldn't have done it without them.
I love your videos, something I’ve always dreamed of doing as a kid.
Add a Arduino controlled oscillator that squirts a little bit of RF in your target band at the end of every scan to give an in-band sync pulse!
A suggestion: maybe put a 6DoF or 9DoF IMU on the dish or feed horn, as you can then get azimuth from the B field, and altitude from the accelerometer. That might make for better output than trusting the open loop control on the stepper motors. Great work!
Also, I used to live up in Roseville, and was a regular over at Ax-Man. Tell 'em Pete says hi when you next stop in!
From this angle, it looks like you got in a fight with the satellite, and you lost(messy hair, beard patch missing, etc.). Now you're throwing in the towel, lol..... 27:00
I love that you use an engineering notebook for note taking. I thought I was one of the only ones.
HAL means hardware abstraction layer... and is like a kernel on a system
It keeps telling me it's sorry, but it can't open the pod bay doors 😢
In terms of stepper control maybe an old 3d printer board would come in handy... serial / easy interface for steppers / easy hardware config for end stops. Track that sat with Gcode! :-) Thanks for the video SIFP always a treat!
You can enable the Serial ports on the computer in BIIS. Ensure the cable internally is connected to the motherboard. Usually Baud rate can be set in the terminal device. Serial will ONLY work at the Baud rate set in the terminal.
Some ware in the programing is a command for cable unwrap. As the cables are going through the center of the azimuth movement. Ad for limmit testing. The satellite dishes used to have limit switches. All have been removed and just bump against end stop a couple times and calls that zero.
This looks so cool ! Makes me want to get into whatever this is.
Hey I'm an instant subscriber this guy's content is in my wheelhouse.....love it.😊
I don't know how I went this long without knowing about this channel.... at last you've arrived😂
10:38 "That still sounds terrible to me, there there has to be a better way to know the drive limit than just slamming into it and grinding the gears like that" - I liked it ! It reminded me of the grunts and grinds sounds coming out an old Apple ][ floppy disk drive.
@10:35 ....look into a PID circuit to control the motor. PID Proportional Integral Derivative, used commonly to control large robotic arms to quickly, efficiently, accurately, and SAFELY for movement.
VCC is power, so it makes sense that wouldn't be used, as the cable frankenstein you made is for data only, and is not transmitting any power
if ur serial connection keeps fn up consistently its usually the serial converter, you could fairly easily adapt an FTDI programmer for that terminal block to rj 45 cable u had
Such a huge video. Thank you so much! Take a rest bro. You deserve it.
Love your channel dude bro. from Faribault. Chaeers.
You heard it here folks..... Minnesotan trees are talking to the satellites at 1694 MHz
That thumbnail… looks like a modified birdbath from the year 2100…
You should consider using Onstep (open source telescope stepper controller) to drive the steppers. It's pretty simple to make, and is already designed to control steppers to go to celestial coordinates. Then you could use an INDI telescope driver to connect and script whatever you felt like. Dump the onboard control entirely. You'd need to get the ratio of the reduction from those pulleys, the type of stepper motor etc. It supports limit switches, and microstepping also, so the accuarcy would probably be far superior to the built on system since it's meant for taking pictures through telescopes through long focal lengths.
That sounds interesting! will put this on the to-do list :-)
I like the longer video personally, even if the end result isn't considered a "success." Generally not really into radio telescopes persay, but anything RF is generally an interest of mine. These little dishes are really pretty neat honestly.
You need to explore the world in circuit debuggers!
ICDs are a lot of fun, you don't necessarily have to know programming language.
A lot of it is very similar to what you've been doing elsewhere.
Amazing how you can see the background from the fence and other objects.
So Cool! -- Love that you got some great images out of it.
I don't understand everything, but I understand enough to be fascinated. Thank you!
Brother, I know this isn't the end of the video, and the video came out a month ago, but I saw some settings labeled "detect stall" or something similar. I'd bet that's to detect when the motors have started grinding.
At 15:07 number 107 is labeled "El Stall Detect" which should logically be the setting for the detection threshold of the elevation motor? Maybe?
Dude adafruit motor controller for the pi zero will control 2 steppers and you can add limit switches thats how i refited mine. I love your channel!
i wonder if you could use a 3d printer board to controll the stepper motors and send gcode via pi to controll that aswell
If those stepper motors are anything like the intelligent lighting i used to work with back when I was a DJ/light tech at a major nightclub, there's probably position sensors strategically placed as markers for the motors. A lot of times I only had to clean the sensors for them to work properly.
Have you ever screwed around with a phased array antenna?
Also, with so many spare tailgater antennas, maybe you could repurpose them by fashioning some other tool on top like a water hose to automatically spray plants in a controlled pattern, or something crazy ,like a guided model rocket launcher.
I haven't tried a phased array yet, that could be fun.
The stronger signal through the rotation is RFI and the serial on the back of your PC is turned on in the BIOS but RS485 is 12V which is a problem as the normal voltage for RS232 is like 5V
I always wonder if the dish is big enough for HRPT receiving, the signal would be a lot stronger than GOES satellites. That way you can made an automated NOAA/METEOR/METOP HRPT receiver that is weatherproof :)
before long he'll have enough RV dishes to build his own very large sparse array radio telescope
I tried building a "Very Small Array" but couldn't get stuff to sync right.
@@saveitforparts may want to look into the "wisper" wspr mode radio clock sync tech for such a task?
Also a very fast/wide network switch synced helps.
ther TDO and TDI is JTag port. useful for debugging and testing the hardware before dispatch. can also be hacked in if it is not secured
I believe that rain pan is the rain cover for a roof exhaust fan. I have one just like it. IBM did consulting for HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) 9000.
Can I have your brain? 😅 when I started visual studio “ 2 weeks late for the semester “ I was completely lost! Can you tell me how to use Alice to message “hello world” to the aliens? lol great job you are a uniquely intelligent person and I admire that! Great video thank you
I actually don't remember much from my programming classes! I remember more from messing with Applesoft BASIC back in the 90's, even though real programmers all say that's a terrible language to learn 😂
I love these videos so much. You are a blessing to us all!
I am in love with your videos ❤
serial port on the dell probably just needs to be enabled in your computers bios
that scanning issue sounds like a backlash issue with your horizontal scan axis belt. it looks pretty loose, and might need some tensioning to cut down on backlash
How about scanning elevation then move over one degree then scan elevation again and so on. In this way your left pan vs your right pan won’t skew the image. Also scan at Hydrogen Line and map the Milky Way. You could also do this with a bigger dish incrementing the vertical only movement using the earth rotation to move the dish?
If you look at the data sheet for the stepper motor drivers TMC294A it has built in Stall detection and homing. That’s why there are no home bc switches on the gimbal
You haven't been able to get obs working on linux? what distro are you using? there should be a pre-built binary in almost every flavor, are you having graphics driver issues?
love these satellite projects! They're super interesting.
Quite possibly driver or system issues. I'm using a 2nd-hand computer that has some other problems. It works really well for video editing but is a little flaky for certain other things.
@saveitforparts At 15:05 Have you tried changing the option 112) Disable Dipswitch from False to True??
I haven't tried that. The DIP switches just seem to set which satellite it looks for, but apparently on other models they do more functions.
There's no need for a separate screen recording software. VLC media player offers a feature that allows you to capture and save your screen output directly to a file.
@saveitforparts
You have inspired me to make my own unit. Cheers !
I'm wondering if I could mount multiple Satellite Receiver Antennas on a Single Dish and have a Pan - Tilt Setup on my roof for me never to touch again :)
and then sit at my computer and do all the coding and scanning....
That set of tools made me drop my jaw in awe lol
Winegard is a company that makes a lot of components used in motorhomes and campers. From being a catv installer for way to long Id bet the reason you see a lot of it for free is not because the winegard equipment is bad but the other components wired through the camper/motorhome build were done during the manufacturing process and used cheap twist on connectors and cheap splitters causing issues that could be corrected. Most campgrounds now wired for cable give the alternative to ditch the winegard sat equipment.