Building a Merlin or Orion Motorized Pano-head
3. Hacking the Orion
After I had gathered all my hardware together, I
got going on the soldering.
Keeping the wires straight on the plug to
power supply to bluetooth path took concentration.
Figuring out the
remote wiring required an ohm meter to confirm that the Orion supplied
2.5mm cable had no continuity in the middle section of the plug. In
order to get my Nikon D80 to fire, I needed to short across the middle
and tip sections.
I haven’t tried a fully stereo cable, so I can’t
confirm whether or not the Orion really can trigger a pre focus and
mine is defective, or if they really should be sending a mono cable.
The photos below should be more instructive than my words here.
The two resistors are used to wire together the RX(recieve) and TX
(transmit) signals. This
means that the controller and head communicate via half-duplex, one
direction at a time.
One more little improvement involves putting opaque tape under the
level.
Otherwise bright sunlight can interfere with the motor’s optical
controls. I am sure it wasn’t a problem for all those astrophotography
folks…