Astrochonum

Cables in astrophography are a pain, especially when on the ground.

One of the worst is the cable going from the Autostar to the PC needed for slewing from a soft such as Starry Night and required to adapt the guiding depending on the declinaison. This cable limits dramatically the handbox mobility for it is connected to both PC and LX90, not to mentioned it requires (another) USB port on the PC.

As it doesn't require low latency connection such as autoguiding for example, we can replace this cable with a bluetooth adapter. Rather than going for a ready to work solution that would cost you at least a hundred bucks, it's cheaper to build it, not to mention the pleasure to burn your Autostar !

For ten Euros, we can find on Ebay bluetooth to UART modules such as this one :

Speed and other parameters are already set up, 9600 b/s in the case of the handbox. On issue is that those modules are working in CMOS TTL mode with 3.3V when RS232 is a bit different not to mention the voltage than can go over 20V. In the case of the serial port of the autostar, that is 9V as Gene mentionned on the LX90 yahoo group. We need then an additional cheap CMOS TTL to RS232 converter based upon the MAX232 chip, such as this one :

The two modules are supply by three AAA batteries that should last for a while given the low consumption of those modules. Note that Ca-Ni battery could be used as well for a voltage of 3.6V. Both modules can fit on a very small electronic box.

Here is the result :

And it's working for less than $30 and a bit of time and no more serial/USB converter issue with Vista !!