Simple low cost circuit to connect inexpensive optical encoders to a dobsonian telescope
Amateur astronomers want to know where their telescope is pointing at. For this reason, many commercial telescopes (like the Orion IntelliScope) come equipped with "push to" features, often based on high precision optical rotary encoders attached to the telescope mount, and a hand control device with a database of coordinates of thousands of stars and other sky objects.
There are also commercial Digital Setting Circles, which are kits sold for telescope owners to adapt to their existing telescope, in order to give it "push to" features, costing a few hundred dollars.
The mobile app SkySafari comes with a celestial database that is often more up-to-date, and it's user interface (a visual representation of the night sky) can be considered superior to what text lines on a push-to hand controller allow.
This project is an open source implementation of Digital Setting Circles for dobsonian telescopes. By using two inexpensive optical encoders and an ESP32 microcontroller it enables amateur astronomers to connect their dobsonian telescope to the SkySafari app.
Particular emphasis has been placed on making sure anybody can build the circuit regardless of their experience (or lack thereof) with electronics or arduino, including a step-by-step guide for a very simple implementation that requires no soldering.
This DSC achieves the following:
This is what it looks like installed on a small tabletop dobsonian: