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Brushed Steel Plate
I’ve cut myself a piece of steel for the sign and managed to get it completed to the point where I can attach the EL wire. I first grabbed two washers, bent them slightly and welded them to…
Read More »Obtaining Materials
I’ve done a bit of work on my bar sign project. First of all, I’ve converted my design to black and white, resized it a bit and printed it out onto A3 paper. This is the (rough) but…
Read More »Electroluminescent Bar Sign Project
A friend of mine is coming up to his 40th Birthday and he’s having a cocktail party to celebrate. I’ve decided I wanted to make him a “Neon” bar sign for a gift. Neon signs are expensive, use…
Read More »Astro CCD Camera and 50mm F1.4 = Mag 9
Auckland weather has turned in the last week. Evenings must be about 5-10 degrees cooler now meaning the atmosphere is more stable and ultimately better sky viewing conditions. I set up my Mintron camera with the 50mm F1.4…
Read More »Satellite Tracking Camera – Progress Update
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…
Read More »Adding Custom Characters to the MAX7456 Video Overlay Generator
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…
Read More »AVR Pulse Per Second & NMEA simulator
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…
Read More »ASCOM and Communications protocols
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…
Read More »Removing Excess Weight
I carefully looked over the entire mechanism to decide which parts to keep. The main circuit board worked and using serial could be commanded to go to a position or even store positions, but it lost out due…
Read More »New Project – Satellite Tracking Camera
I recently acquired a second hand Pan Tilt mechanism from a CCTV camera system.
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