James Trickle uPMay 18

I started cooking up another personal software project this weekend. I am going to play around with the ideas of the Celestron StarSense phone app and the PiFinder kit, and work toward a plate solving push-to astronomy aid. #PiFinder #StarSense #astronomy #AstronomySoftware #PlateSolver

I have no previous mobile stack experience, so that is new and a bit daunting. Lots of C++, Dart/Flutter, CMake and Python in this project. I am pretty capable with #ComputerVision pipelines, but plate solving and the size of the databases needed is also new.

Should be fun.

GonzaloOct 30, 2025

Analog Sky Ember: https://www.analogsky.co/ember
PiFinder: https://www.pifinder.io

#astronomy #analogsky #stargazing #binoculars #3dprinting #ember #pifinder

Show threadLance Taylor #VA6LATAug 21, 2024
So, my buddy made one of these. Apparently, it works very well. #PiFinder #RaspberryPi He also #3DPrinted the scope. #yegastro #Astronomy #Astrophotograpy #3DPrinting Hadley
Show threadLance Taylor #VA6LATAug 17, 2024

Richard Wolff Jacobson - #PiFinder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKtz1FavaCw

#yegastro #Astronomy #astrophotography #RaspberryPi Hadley

Richard Wolff Jacobson - PiFinder

YouTube
Show threadhillexedDec 10, 2023

Oops, celebrated being finished with the PiFinder too soon

The original PiFinder uses a $50 USB GPS module. To avoid spending $50, I wrote some code to fake a GPS. Eventually the dev brickbots switched PiFinders to a $10 solderable GPS module that uses UART instead of USB, and $10 felt reasonable, so I bought one and soldered it in. I thought I was done and that all I had to do was edit the software to remove my fake GPS code and use the regular GPS code! I was wrong - the GPS didn't connect.

My Sliced PiFinder uses a raspberry pi 3 but the PiFinder was designed for a raspberry pi 4. I thought the only difference was CPU speed, but there's more: the instructions asked me to solder the GPS to two pins which couldn't speak UART on a pi 3 but could on a pi 4. Oops.

The Pi 3 has only one pair of GPIO pins that can speak UART: 14 and 15. By default it's used for a "linux serial console", but you can configure it for custom use (like listening to GPS) by adding enable_uart=1 in /boot/config.txt.

So I desoldered my GPS, attached it to pins 14 and 15 with some truly janky soldering (pictured), fixed a "NMEA unknown msg" problem by turning off echo according to comments here, edited gpsd.conf, and now GPS is finally working.

NOW the Sliced PiFinder is done!

#diy #electronics #raspberrypi #astronomy #pifinder

hillexedDec 3, 2023

Thread about telescope-related electronics shenanigans!

The pifinder is a tool to help you aim a telescope. It uses a camera to take pictures of the sky, connected to a raspberry pi which uses a database of stars to say where in the sky your telescope is pointing. Then, if you want to find some galaxy, it tells you what direction to move your telescope in.

I call mine the "Sliced Pifinder" because they sell for $550 and I'm DIYing one myself for a slice of the cost. That's possible because instead of the recommended a $60 raspi 4, $50 HQ camera, $25 lens and $50 GPS, I'm using a $10 lens, a secondhand raspi 3, a cheaper camera, and a $20 IMU with unpronounceable name I found lying around in a drawer of sensors.

First I scavenged a pi camera from 2013. Turns out it wasn't sensitive enough to see many stars, so I bought a better innonaker IMX462 camera chip. However, the new one was bigger, and while the pifinder only uses M2.5 screws, this camera's mounting holes were M2. Another hardware store trip was needed.

So I designed another 3D printed enclosure for the new camera, printed a second after the first one was too small, put it together, and took it outside... and the the camera successfully saw stars! This camera is definitely much more sensitive than the old one. Plus, because it's connected to a raspberry pi, I can just SSH in and ask it to take pictures to see the raw camera output. But the software had more problems...

#telescope #pifinder #electronics #Astrodon