At this time of the year the best time to get a picture of the planet Jupiter from where I live is around 3:00am. I've got my telescope by the door so that at first opportunity I can quickly take it outside to perform setup and start taking pictures. But I didn't get a chance to do this Saturday on account of weather. It was cloudy outside and rain was in the forecast, so I knew I wouldn't have an opportunity. So I instead decided to turn my efforts towards something that would be of assistance to my telescope usage in the future. The telescope has a hand control device but in an age with so many smart phones I thought I could do better. So I decided to start on implementing my own hand control with my Windows Phone.
My first goal was to simply make something that I could use to control the telescope within 24 hours. For the initial run there is a laptop connected to the RS232 port on my telescope. It will eventually be replaced with a .Net Micro Framework device, but for a prototype with 24-hour turn around trying to get custom hardware up and running was not possible. I made a client for my phone that would be my primary point of control for the telescope. I was successful at getting my goal achieved but at the end of it I came to realize that I had started to get into some augmented reality concepts without trying.
I had been taking notes and video logs of my progress (one video log entry is below) and I'll be breaking them down into a form that is more applicable to general applications. Some of the math involved can be scary, so to keep it understandable by more people I will by be making use of the math routines available in XNA and allow the reader to look further into XNA if he or she wants to know what it is doing behind the scenes. For example, you will see how to use an XNA matrix to do rotation calculations, but I won't be explaining what XNA is doing behind the scenes to perform such operation.
The first of several post that comes from my weekend efforts will come tomorrow evening after I proof a few things.
Video
Tags: Augmented Reality, Windows Phone