Planning ahead

Although the summer isn't actually over I've spent the last few weekends in the house 'doing jobs' and radio has taken a serious back burner for slightly longer. This has given me a chance to think about what I am going to attempt over the winter months in terms of housekeeping and projects.

During my time studying for my degree (a while ago now) we spent some time with robotics and making little devices follow lines, look for light sources in mazes, that sort of thing and I found it really interesting. Afterwards I thought that I'd quite like to incorporate some of this learning into a project. As expected family life and other things put a stop to that...until this weekend. Still the programming seemed to be within my grasp.

I've ordered an arduino uno kit from Hong Kong. I'm expecting that will be a close that closely resembles the real thing but with a few crucial speeling mishtakes that make it barely legal. I plan to spend some time getting to know the board and its ways before embarkin on the project I fancy having a go at.

The platform is a simple one and to my mind is a bit like a PIC only has 'shields' that are used to add things like ethernet or bluetooth and motor control to the bare board. This will suit me better as there is potentially less for me to do wrong in terms of component selection and circuit design. In other words I can think of the various parts as blocks rather than discrete components.

So what is the plan? Well I'm thinking of building a lightweight rotator with both azimuth and elevation for satellite use. The SB270 beam from SOTAbeams is a great antenna for being up on the fells but it wouls also be useful at home for this kind of use. The plan that hatched itself in my head is roughly to use the arduino to control the rotator using HRD or something similar to track a satellite such as AO51 or the ISS or anything else for that matter from a camera tripod. An evenings googling shows that this has been done to some extent at least with the software and with larger antennas but the SB270 is around 300g on its own and could possibly be driven with simple hobby servos which would make life very arduino freindly.

Whats next? wait for the aruindo and in the mean time plan out the job properly. Brush up on my 3D desgin skills for the hardware and start to determine exactly what I'm going to need to make this work.