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Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32


How I went from buying a €200 tracker to building a custom telescope mount with harmonic drives, ESP32, and way more engineering than necessary

Armed with an OM System OM-5 and a 15-140mm Olympus lens, I managed some decent shots of the Orion Nebula from a tripod by taking 300 pictures with a 2-second exposure time and stacking them in Siril. My first project replaced my home thermostat with an ESP32-based design with e-paper display, interlocking finger patterns for the original carbon rubber dome switches and space for a Bosch BME680 sensor breakout. The result: I2C communication was impossible due to NO-CONNECT pins erroneously tied to ground, and manually getting the VBUS voltage to 24V using an external PD trigger board caused a sudden tiny hole to appear on the chip package, followed by blue smoke.

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