Thanks, I'll post the plug-in the new couple of weeks (or less). It should be a simple matter of mapping the opto-22 I/O to the Mach 3 I/O.
The item in the picture is a telescope mount for a 6" Mead. I can't take full credit for the scope mount. I bought the bulk of it from VetCo Electronics Surplus in Bellevue WA (east of Seattle), paid about $150 for it. It was a one-of-a-kind custom project built by "heaven knows who" (the folks at the store didn't known). I would really like to meet the person who made it! However, I made repairs and major modifications to "re-purpose" it. The original machining was quite impressive and it was well constructed, I learned a lot by reverse engineering and improving it -- I've made three of these so far.
What's special about it is that it is a full equatorial motorized 2 axis mount, not a 1 axis motorized mount with a fixed latitude elevation. You can simply take the scope anywhere, turn it on, the GPS tells it where it is on the planet etc, then you tell it a location to point at (coordinates or a celestial object name) using a PDA or laptop and it will find the celestial object for you automatically and track it based on known movement of the object from the database. The scope was mounted to a standard 1 axis Mead base (from surplus) with a worm-gear & multi-speed motor drive with built in variable speed motor. This had limitations that I managed to overcome with steppers, although vibration is a bit of an issue. What is really cool is that given the really accurate data available these days I should be able to track all kinds of low orbit things like the International Space Station, satellites etc. IFF I can get the steppers to turn the thing fast enough. I've seen some articles in the various mags showing how to time when fast moving objects are overhead.
2) Longer-term: I want to developing an terrestrial object tracking system, to follow fast moving far away objects like model airplanes, birds, race cars, acrobatic sailplanes etc (I know what you are thinking -- let's keep it clean people!). What is really neat is there's a tiny micro-chip you can get that provides a serial-to-LanC interface. Most people don't know that LanC is the protocol to control most video cameras. So you just send commands through the serial interface and the video camera can start/stop/ff/rw/zoom-in/out etc. You can use any uCPU (like a Basic Stamp) or laptop/PDA to drive this thing, and also drive the servos/steppers. So hook up your video camera to the scope... you get the picture (sorry for the pun).
--Scott
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