Happy super blood wolf moon!   I'll post pictures from this very telescope tonight!

The drive system is progressing...  I've hooked up the reduction box Mark I to the telescope and with the help of 32x micro-stepping I don't really need to have as much reduction.  But the design of this reduction box is that I can change up the gears (add / remove) if I needed to.

Here is the Mark I setup:

Couple things to point out:

The Mark I box doesn't have any attachment points yet; it is more just for testing.  I'm printing Mark II now that I can screw down.

The large belt (the one on the telescope) is just clipped together.  I need to find the right point to clip it so that I have full movement of the telescope.

It would be nice if I could incorporate some kind of clutch that would allow me to move the telescope manually.

I should build in a "main belt" tension system into the pulley box.  That might have to wait until Mark III.

The wine is important here...

I'm just using a DIRT simple arduino setup.  Just a pololu style stepper driver breakout, a couple buttons, and an Arduino Nano.  I'll add those to the parts list when I get a little closer, but the goal is for this to be connected to the PI and have full control over the network just like Pate's.

Finally to the point...

This setup with two reduction pulleys (20 -> 100 + 20 -> 100 + 30 -> 300)  or ( 5 * 5 * 10) * 32X microsteping =  8000!  I'm all set.  Using just push button to move up and down works well and I'm able to track nicely and the motion is silky smooth.  There doesn't seem to be too much backlash, but I'll need to tension the main belt a little better before I can say for sure.

At this point I'm at least confident that I can make this whole thing work.