Can this rotor hold an Arrow II antenna? I’m interested in a small rotor to point my antenna while making QSOs. Since this is mostly 3D printed the material strength would likely be a limiting factor for me tho. I don’t own an enclosed printer so the hardest material I can do is PETG.
I would say, yes, if mounted somehow centered, not mounted with the end of the yagi to the AZ-EL if you get what I mean.
I just sliced the whole thing, and wow. It uses surprisingly little filament! I will definitely be making this in the future. The arrow mount shouldn’t be too hard, I can probably design a part to mount the arrow in the middle of its boom to the rotator.
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One question, the web page specifies “ten turn variable resistors”. What resistance should these potentiometers be?
I have used 10kOhm resistors, but anything between 2 k and 50 k should do. On the 5th turn the voltage on the “runner” is always half of the voltage on the outer connections 
With a 1 k resistor and 5 volt on both outer connections you draw 5 mA so even that should be no problem.
I had wired them wrong the first time. normal variable resistors have the runner as middle connection, my multiturns had them on the outside. There even was a drawing on them with the connections…
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I thought I allready created a Google photo album but this is what I have taken as images when printing , mounting, errorring and more.
Might be handy
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I’ve made a list of bolts needed with the file names of the STLs they go through:
vertical_base - lagerklem M4 25mm 2x
base_plate - lagerklem M4 50mm 2x
tandwiel_groot - tandwiel_groot M4 15mm 8x
tandwiel_groot - tandwiel_groot - bus - vertical_base M4 30mm 4x
tandwiel_groot - tandwiel_groot - bus - arm* M4 30mm 4x
motor - vertical_base M3 5mm x3
motor - base_plate M3 5mm x4
20x M4 nuts
mounting M8 >50mm (depends on your mounting solution)
*“arm” is not an STL, it just refers to the L-bracket that goes on the elevation gears, like the onne made by kerel in an earlier comment in this thread.
These aren’t 100% verified, I haven’t built the rotor yet, but I think everything should be correct.
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I just finished building the rotor and it’s working well. I also made a modification of the original code that is ported to platformio and adds some mods like most importantly the command to get the value of the potentiometers, so rigctl can read the true position. I also added a small guide for using the rotor with rigctl & gpredict.
Right now there’s a bug that breaks the az/el display on the lcd while the rotor is on. I’ll probably fix it soon.
Hope this is useful to someone. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/DB8LE/pe1ckk_rotor_software
I also designed some custom 3D printed parts that I plan on uploading soon too.
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Hi Leo, i’m just printing all the parts for the AZ-EL rotor.
Where can i find your custom 3D parts ?
Vy 73 de Alain [DD5AA]
Hi Alain,
I haven’t uploaded the files anywhere yet because they kind of suck, and I still need to work on them a bit.
I’ve uploaded the latest version here for now.
Ist hier eigentlich englisch Pflichtsprache ?
Lieber Theo, vielen Dank.
Ja ich will da auch noch einige Änderungen machen, gerade für die Aufnahme.
Wieso sind die Zahnräder in 2 Hälften gemacht, zumal die Bohrungen auch nicht symmetrisch sind ?
Die Zahnritzel für die Motoren sind passen bei mir nicht, die Abflachung ist zu schmal und das ganze hat ziemlich viel spiel.
73 Alain [DD5AA]
[quote=“db8le, post:48, topic:12827”]
tandwiel_groot - tandwiel_groot M4 10mm 8x
2 gears printed on one bed had a bad fit. I re-printed the second large gear to be solo on the bed and that matched the first printed gear.
help me please, Compilation error: rgb_lcd.h: No such file or directory
Grove_LCD_RGB_Backlight-master.zip (29.6 KB)
It’s completely not fresh in my memory but I might have caught that one from installing the grove library, you can give it a try ?
Excellent, thank you very much, it worked and corrected the error
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Hello,
I’m trying to build this rotator, and so far, so good. I just want to ask Leo @db8le if he managed to resolve the problem with the LCD screen?
73 4O5JD