Description
Ardufocus is a stepper motor controller designed from the ground up for astronomy usage, our aim is to enable you to have the most accurate Open Source focus controller for a fraction of the price of the commercial ones.
Ardufocus is Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware which means you have access to all the firmware, software and hardware needed to build or modify the platform according to your preferences.
Using off-the-shelf components such as the Arduino Nano and easily available parts Ardufocus is aimed to be build by anyone with a soldering iron and some patience, no degree in electronics required.
Another big point was to made it as cheap as possible recurring to as few parts as needed. That’s the reason why the 28BYJ-48 stepper motor was chosen, out-of-the-box using the ULN2003 gives you a really cheap focuser for medium loads. If you require the focuser to driver heavier loads then the motor itself can be physically modded into a Bipolar stepper motor and driven by the A4988 step stick which will cost you in overall less than $10.
The project started by being a Moonlite protocol compatible focuser but in order to leverage some of the new features such as High Resolution (32-bit integers), I am currently developing it’s own custom set of ASCOM IFocuserV3 drivers.
Contribute
Ardufocus is a one-man-army kind of a project which I develop on my free time, if you use it please help out by spreading the love or, if you prefer to assure it’s long-term continuity consider one of the options bellow:
Key features
- Up to two independent steppers with only one controller
- Stepper position is kept between power cycles
- High resolution mode using 32-bit counters
- Multiple stepper drivers are supported
- Multiple acceleration profiles
Additional features
- Moonlite protocol compatible
- Remote soft-reset of the microcontroller
- Enable/Disable of thee automatic reset on serial connection
- Allow motor direction inversion by software
- Automatic enter sleep mode when idle with use defined timeout
- User defined min, max and acceleration speeds
- Fine tune of NTC parameters
Source code
Each Ardufocus module is located on it’s own Github public repository:
License
Ardufocus is licensed under GNU GPLv3.
Ardufocus PCB schematics are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.