www.tanstaafl.co.uk

I didn’t have a lot of time this evening, but took a monitor, keyboard and mouse down to the warm room, connected them and one of the pier computers up to the KVM switch and powered everything on.

All the hardware seems to work fine, despite the length (5m, from memory) of the HDMI and USB cables. I even managed to pick up a wifi signal from the house, but it wasn’t stable enough to use for any length of time. I think I was averaging about 10Mb/s over the wifi link, dropping down to 1Mb/s at times. It was like being in the 1980s 😀

I’m pleased to be able to relate that all the mains wiring in the observatory is now complete and it is connected up to the existing supply from the house. I no longer have extension leads and trailing sockets all over the place which is a big improvement, to say the least.

Yesterday I had quite a big tidy up to get rid of most of the stuff that’s been hanging about “in case I need it” which has also improved things by making much more space. I also refitted the desk (previously removed to make it easier for the cabling to be done) and got most of the trunking finished.

Today I made up a shelving unit to go under the desk so I’d have somewhere to put the 12V PSUs in the warm room and then cut up a discarded length of twin core cable with nice fat conductors (it was on a cement mixer until someone managed to break one end) to feed 12V from the PSUs to the cabling running under the floor. Once that was done I made up the connections at the pier ends. All this whilst repeatedly rolling the roof on and off due to random showers. I could have just left the roof closed, but it was unpleasantly humid here today (I think it was about 90% RH at one point) and I wanted all the ventilation I could get. After that I undertook a ridiculously paranoid level of testing as I was very keen not to feed the wrong polarity to a NEQ6, before powering a mount up and using the handset to point it at whatever objects I thought might be in the afternoon sky (all obscured by clouds, sadly). Apparently Mercury, Venus and the Moon were all there somewhere and Jupiter was just creeping above the eastern horizon.

Finally I took down one of the computers that I intend to use on the piers and connected it up inside the box on one of the piers. It’s all a bit scruffy at the moment, but it might allow me to do a bit of testing later in the week.

At this point I think all that remains in terms of cabling is finshing the network cables (putting the RJ45 plugs on, basically) and deciding on the final routing for the cabling for the power supply for the scope room lights. They’re powered from a 24V PSU that I intend plug into a standard 13A socket in the warm room. I just need to come to a decision about routing the cable between the two and get it sorted. There’s probably no major rush for that though, as I can feed them from one of the IP66 sockets on the warm room wall for the time being.

After a month away from construction because of holidays and other stuff going on, this weekend I spent some time working on the power for the piers.

Photos to follow, but each pier now has an IP66-rated cabinet attached (which is probably no longer IP66 as I’ve cut holes in them, but I really only need them to keep dew off the kit inside so that’s hardly a major issue: it’s not as though I’m going to be hosing them down or leaving the roof open in the pouring rain). Inside the cabinet is a double socket and a 12V supply to go to the mount. Once I have the observatory connected up to the electricity supply I’ll be putting a small form factor PC inside as well.

The entire process took somewhat longer than expected whilst I worked out exactly how I was going to have things work, but once the first one was done the next two were considerably quicker.

I also have all the sockets in place in the warm room (eight doubles!) and three double sockets in IP66 housings on the walls of the scope room.

Jobs remaining for the electrics are to install the consumer unit and connect the entire thing up to the mains supply. I also need a couple of sockets to supply the lighting. My intention is to have a separate ring for those that can have a 5A MCB.