Regular readers of my blog will know that I’ve been working on building a satellite tracking system. The plan is to end up with a fully automatic Pan/Tilt positioning system with a high sensitivity video camera, millisecond accuracy video time overlay, and automated image processing of automated frames.

I’ve been busy the last two weeks converting code and waiting for deliveries to arrive.

I finally received the 50mm F1.4 lens I ordered off ebay. This lens is a lovely unit, especially for US$50. It’s nice and heavy with manual aperture and focus controls. A quick test on the light polluted skies of Auckland resulted in me being able to image stars of Magnitude 4, so it’s well within the limit for the project.

The 50mm F1.4 Lens attached to the CCD Camera

Regular readers of my blog will know that I've been working on building a satellite tracking system. The plan is to end up with a fully automatic Pan/Tilt positioning system with a high sensitivity video camera, millisecond accuracy video time overlay, and automated image processing of automated frames. I've been busy the last two ...

I’m playing with the Maxim MAX7456 Video On-Screen Display Generator for my Satellite Tracking Camera project. I’m wanting to use it to overlay accurate (GPS locked) time stamps onto each individual field of a PAL or NTSC video signal.

The Chip has a font set of 256 12×18 pixel characters of which most of them are Japanese characters and of no use to me. It’s surprisingly easy (albeit convoluted) to update the characters to something more useful. Of particular note, simple images spanning multiple characters and rows can be displayed as there is no invisible space between rows or colums.
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I'm playing with the Maxim MAX7456 Video On-Screen Display Generator for my Satellite Tracking Camera project. I'm wanting to use it to overlay accurate (GPS locked) time stamps onto each individual field of a PAL or NTSC video signal. The Chip has a font set of 256 12x18 pixel characters of which most of ...

As part of building my Satellite Tracking Camera, I’m building a GPS time inserter to insert accurate time stamps on a video feed.

I’m unable to get GPS reception in my test/development area, so I decided it would be easier to simulate the GPS with a microcontroller.

This circuit simulates a PPS (Pulse Per Second) output and the GPGGA and GPRMC NMEA sentences.

The circuit is pretty simple.

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As part of building my Satellite Tracking Camera, I'm building a GPS time inserter to insert accurate time stamps on a video feed. I'm unable to get GPS reception in my test/development area, so I decided it would be easier to simulate the GPS with a microcontroller. This circuit simulates a PPS (Pulse Per Second) output ...

I hope you all had a great New Year and have big plans for 2011.

I don’t have much new to report on the Satellite tracking platform.

I’ve been looking into equipment for the system and at communications protocols.
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I hope you all had a great New Year and have big plans for 2011. I don't have much new to report on the Satellite tracking platform. I've been looking into equipment for the system and at communications protocols. My initial plan was to use Linux as my operating system to run the tracker, but ...