We are still trying to get our venerable, university-grade Ealing mount to work properly with its new OnStep motor drive system. We thought we had – at long last – everything set up perfectly and running correctly with the various components wired up properly but not yet pushed into place in the interior cavities of our mount. All seemed to be working well until we pushed the last components and wires inside, and then closed the hatches.

Then things stopped working.

We soon figured out that the force we had to use when moving all those items inside the mount had broken some of the leads. We found those broken leads and replaced them with shorter ones.

When we started it up again, we discovered that the mount would not ‘track’ to the west in right ascension — something that the software and hardware are programmed to do as soon as the system is turned on. In fact, I couldn’t slew it to the west either. Eastwards was no problem. Also, we could only slew southwards, not northwards.

We didn’t know what to do, so I emailed a followup question to the wonderful folks at the OnStep wiki. Several folks thought we had a balance issue or a limit switch issue, but I went up today to check on the balance — and concluded that’s not the problem. We have no limit switches yet either in hardware or in software. So that’s not it, either.

Wondering if we had somehow screwed up the MaxESP3 board that is the heart of the OnStep system, I unplugged the board (and all of its sub-boards, as a unit) we had been using last weekend, and plugged in a duplicate board, built by Ken Hunter and ‘flashed’ by him with the same Config.H file as the other one.

Listen to the screeching!

Another suggestion is that we may be creating ground loops by not connecting our wiring properly. I don’t know. I wish I had taken some electronics classes during my time in college. It would have come in handy here!