Re: Re: ATM Microcontroller based telescope driver III

[martin.cibulski@degussa.com]

>gjnelson@absamail.co.za wrote:
>
>The only suggestion I could think of making was to make a simple
>method of uploading a datafile for a tour of the sky. Similar to
>Mel's grand tour function in scope.

Hello Geoff,
thank you for your nice comments on my project !

I plan to add a user defined database to the menu.
The database can be downloaded via RS232 connection into the 4 kBytes
EEPROM of the controller.
The EEPROM is specified to be programmable at least 100000 times.

But only about 1 kByte of the EEPROM can be used for this because the
software
needs most of it for parameters and PWM tables.

Can you give a suggestion for a good compromise between:
(1.) Many objects, indexed by numbers and having RA/DEC positions only
(2.) Not many objects, but individual names and more info to display

How many objects are usually contained in a 'grand tour' ?

As an example for (1.) the NGC catalogue will give only positions
(compressed into 4 bytes per object).
Some NGC objects have A/B/C suffixes. They must appear as one object only
so the NGC number can be
used as array index to access the position data.
As an example for (2.) the 64 alignment stars show individual names like
'UMi Alp ' taking 8 additional bytes each.
Every info field added will need 8 bytes more.


Best Regards and a happy new year to everybody !
Martin
http://martin.cibulski.bei.t-online.de