The Ultimate Dew Shield

by C.Y. Tan 2016

I looked at the commercially available dew shields for my 8" LX200 and I thought that I could do better. The requirements for my dew shield are as follows:

• I want my dew shield to be perfectly fitted on my LX200 that takes into account the optical rails that are mounted on both the top and bottom of my LX200.
• I want a temperature controller for the dew shield that measures both the dew point as well as the ambient temperature. The controller will use these temperature measurements to set the internal temperature of the dew shield to a differential temperature that is set by the user.

Support

All the software have been successfully compiled on Mac OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite) and 10.11.2 (El Capitan) running Arduino IDE 1.6.5. Note: Later versions of Arduino IDE cannot compile the Arduino Pro Micro library. See the README.md in the arduino directory for more information.

This is unsupported software and hardware. Build at your own peril! :)

You can submit questions or bug reports using the issues tab on the right and then click on NEW.

Have fun!

Directory structure

• arduino The C++ code for the Arduino Pro Micro.
• arduino_case The case design for the controller.
• bom Bill of materials for 1 ultimate dew shield.
• eagle Eagle schematic and board files.
• howto Guides for how to assemble the dew shield and the controller.
• controller_analysis The analysis of the temperature control loop.
• writeup A writeup of the motivation and analysis of the Ultimate Dew Shield.

Other information

More information can be found in he README.md files in each directory and the wiki of this project on github.

Copyright

All the software, documentation, hardware that I have written is copyright 2016 C.Y. Tan.

All software is released under GPLv3

All documentation is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License or GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3

All hardware is released under CERN Hardware Open License v1.2