I have a mead 494 controller and a DS-2000 series mount (not sure if its Gen I or II). Ive done a bit of searching and haven't found any arduino projects for the DS-2000 series mount. Now I could just fork over some coin and upgrade to the 497, but I'm considering trying an arduino approach. Any of you moco guys know if this would be possible, and explain why or why not?

Simply put: Meade has never been 'open' with their communication protocol... The only way we've been able to effectively communicate with Meade heads was to hack the firmware on the 497 hand controller so it could work for our purposes. This was effectively blocked when Meade updated the chipset on the 497(eg) controller making it almost impossible to upload a modified firmware.

At this point you would literally have to sniff out and reverse engineer the communication between the handset and the head breaking it down one hex at a time. Extremely tedious work.

Why not just go with Orion? The communication protocol is well documented: http://www.gigapixel.nu/info_project.php

Milpase; can you please give a model number for the Orion product and do you know of a store that ships outside the USA ?


cheers

Any of the products listed here will work fine:
http://dynamicperception.com/?main_page ... age_id=334

I'm not really an expert on who carries them and where they will ship. If I understand it correctly ... the 'Merlin' is what's sold in markets outside of the US and the 'TeleTrack' is sold in the US.

You'll just have to look around and see what Google tells you...