In this post we’ll implement the basic communications between the PC and Arduino for our purpose. Also we’ll use the coordinate transformation with Arduino to implement a program that receive the equatorial coordinates as input, and then returns the azimuthal equivalent as output.
For the moment we can obtain these coordinates with Stellarium. With this data, we’ll implement a Python script to communicate with Arduino to establish the reference objects and then calculate the azimuthal coordinates (Az/Alt in Stellarium) from the equatorial ones for any object. It will be a kind of Arduino based “USB coprocessor” to coordinate transformation. Although as coprocessor it will be as unuseful as curious, I think 🙂