Pan Tilt outdoor motor with Pelco-D support

SatNOGS Hardware
1

Hi, if I can get a used / working Pan Tilt outdoor motor wih + and - 50 degrees tilt and 355 pan range what are the chances I can interface this as a Satnogs rotator ? Anyone who tried this ?

Thanks,
Ben

1 Like
2

Hi Ben,
Yes I have tried it on the bench using an Arduino that listens to the seral port for EasyCom commands from the computer.
I got it working up to the point were Gpredict was controlling it.
But there is more work for me before it will be ready.
You will need an TTL serial to RS-485 converter to interface with the Pan/Tilt . M5Stack makes a good an inexpensive one that I use.
I used the hardware UART in an ATMega 328 for the computer interface and SoftSerial for the Pan/Tilt communication.
Tried it on both ATMEga328P and ESP82885 and in it worked fine on both these MCUs so use what you have at hand.

There are two ways you can command the pan tilt.
1 Send a “GoTo” command that commands it to go to a specific location in rotation and elevation.
This is what I use up to now in my code. The downside with this command on my Pan/Tilt was that is was busy while perfoming the operation and did not answer any commands or queries during the reposition

2 Command it to go in some direction and then continously query its position until it has arrived and you send it a stop command. This is a more usefull way of commanding it as you can set the speed so you can do an accelaration ramp and you will get updates along the way so you can update a display if you so wanted. I will probably re-write my code to do it this way.

1 Like
3

Thanks for this information ! Let me check if indeed the total of the motor and shipment from the US of A to Europe matches my upcoming birthday gift :slight_smile: