I ordered the smaller harmonic drive from Ebay monday night, $180 shipped. It showed up on my door wednesday morning... From South Korea. Wow...

The drive is pretty nice and should work great. It feels a bit lumpy turning by hand but connected to a motor is seems fine. I did decide to use the lower res servo on this axis. This axis just stays in one spot one you are locked on, the RA axis does all the tracking. If all else fails I can pick up another motor for the other J2S drive I have.

For a control I am going to try using an arduino, this guy came up with a ASCOM compatible arduino based controller for mounts with step/dir drives. It can connect to a PC and be controlled from ASCOM or LX200 compatible software or through bluetooth with an Android app he wrote. He also wrote an ASCOM compatible driver for the Quantix camera I am using. That saves a lot of time...

http://www.stellarjourney.com/index.php?r=site/equipment_onstep

Finished up a bunch of the CAD this last weekend and started machining the parts, I was not happy with the surface finish I was getting with the end mill I had on hand so I ordered another variable flute end mill for aluminum from Lake Shore Carbide. They make some real nice cutters that leave a mirror finish on sidewalls. Digging around in the shop I found a bunch of the 1/2" aluminum that the robot was made out of, I will use that for the support sections. I also found a piece of 1-3/16" x 7-7/8" aluminum stock about 5' long in the shop I had pulled out of a machine that handled IC dies. It will become the Dec motor mount and probably the dovetail saddle for the telescope to mount to.