[RadioTelescope] Radiotelescope Project - First night update & findings

[Trent Lloyd]

Myself [LAT], Harry [HMC], Adam [EDO] and David [SLX] had a look at the telescope today, here's what we have found:

WARNING: There are LIVE 240V terminals exposed on several parts of the box, both in terms of the power supplies and even some leads running onto the logic board.  So please leave the box alone for now until we can put insulated covers and better warnings on those terminals!


The stepper motors are "HY200 3450 700A8"

This seems to mean Hybrid 200 steps/revolution 3.4 diameter, 5.0inch length, 7A, 1 shaft, 8 leads (Data sheet attached)


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It has a DC power supply for the logic board, supply 5V, GND, -12V and +12V which is tested working and voltages reading fairly well:

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There is a logic board, it appears to be a custom done board by the job number, etc... it has relays which are interlocks to activate the stepper motor power supply (shown below), the left side of the board seems to have some analogue comparators to change/set travel limits
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It then has 3 big rotary switches (blue shafts) - One for each stepper (azimuth, elevation), and one to select "local" or "remote".. the white connector on the right is a remote collector which we *believe* to be parallel driven - but apparently that has not been used.

There is a little blue trim pot at the bottom to the left of the green buttons.. this changes the clock and slows down the step rate.. and the three green buttons along the bottom are "off", "on" and "override".. off/on turn the stepper drivers power on/off .. which makes quite a clunk and a light dim when it does .



Here is the power supply for the stepper controller:

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and the stepper motor drivers which are now plugged into the steppers, which were nicely labelled (everything in the box is quite well labelled)


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dymo labels on the edge of the aluminium section, indicating which stepper cable goes where.  Numbered 2-3-4-5.

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We have the stepper motors stepping/moving and changing rate based on the clock rate.. we suspect once we get the parallel part going then we can step a bit nicer in terms of 1 pulse, 1 step rather than the continual step it does at the moment.. there are 3 positions on the rotary switches for elevation/azimuth are "left", "right" and "stop"

At some rates on the clock selector the steppers seem to judder/don't manage to move a step correctly which could be concerning but may simply be because the local "override" section is not so well designed.. and may work better with the remote interface (will find out later!)




Successful first night, next step is to figure out the parallel interface, either find some schematics or I personally suspect it won't be too hard to reverse engineer it if necessary.  And hopefully the side of things is more accurate and responds to the travel limits.


Regards,
Trent