LX200 Thoughts

Before I sound like a hater, I have to say that three of the five telescopes I've owned were made by Meade. My next one will be, too. But there are both good and bad things about Meade's products. Good - they are very clever conceptually. Bad - the implementation is rarely successful. Take my 10" LX200 for example. Everything about the LX200 was a great idea. Then they put plastic bearings on the dec axis. I'll leave it at that, for fear of really whining. No, I won't. The connectors are telephone connectors - made for indoor use only. Dew corrodes them.

I have always tolerated Meade's little quirks because overall, and especially optically, they are really good scopes. Then the DEC axis outputs fried completely, and it would slew south as soon as I turned the thing on. I pulled the boards, shipped them to a friend in Texas for parts, and built a replacement. A box 23" x 19" x 8.5", with a motherboard, three servo controllers four switching power supplies, two laptops. What a monstrosity that was. Not really portable, so not really practical. On the bottom shelf the LX200 went for another 6 years or so.

My wife noticed it there and reminded me. "You should do something about that." "I did something about that - I put it on the shelf." and so on. But then I thought the technology had improved significantly since those days, and I should try again. I am, and it is well under way, and I will put it up here as I get things to post. The only thing that is certain is the basic design. It has an ATmega328 acting as a master to a pair of ATtiny2313's which operate as PID servo controllers. It should be interesting.

I have the design done, and the board is done, but I haven't written one line of code. The one thing I can really do. Oh, well.