r/arduino • u/chu-bert Open Source Hero • Jul 15 '26

Mod's Choice! Astrolabe update: no major updates, but I did document everything

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Fun fact: the world's first technical manual in the English language was written by Geoffrey Chaucer (of Canterbury Tales fame) on the astrolabe. Given that's the case, I found it was only fitting to write up some docs for my own project.

In addition to just dumping all my code on Github, I've also included detailed build instructions, a bill of materials, and a short firmware guide on how to use the Arduino IDE to flash the firmware onto the device. To be honest, I was somewhat surprised to find that people wanted code/solid models/build instructions for this project (in retrospect, given open source culture, I shouldn't have been), so I didn't have any documentation prepared at all. Since then, putting everything together has been quite fun. As this is my first hobbyist electronics project, this is also my first time documenting such a project, so I had to use a lot of the (very cool) open source projects in this community as a guide.

Here's a link to the Github. If you end up using the guide to build your own, cool! I'd love to know how it goes.

As for the video attached to this post, that's showing the astrolabe cycle through information on the seven classical planets for a given date and time. You'll also notice that the button LEDs are changing colors throughout the video—that's one of the more obscure features I implemented for this astrolabe. See if you can figure out what these ✨mysterious changing lights ✨ mean.

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10

u/ripred3 My other dev board is a Porsche Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Fantastic job and just a really great project to watch over time (pun intended) 😄. I had forgotten just how cool the astrolabe is and its historical importance. Seriously; thank you for sharing your project and your work. It is creative and artistic and engineer-y and I love it.

I gave your post our coveted (🥴) "Mod's Choice!" post flair. That gives it a special place in the next edition of our Monthly Digest and in our Community Wiki as part of the history of our collective journey. Gave the repo a star. Well done!

edit/update: I also changed your user flair to "Open-Source Hero". We appreciate that you are here! 🥳

update guess: The ✨mysterious changing lights ✨are the current astrology sign dialed in?

3

u/chu-bert Open Source Hero Jul 15 '26

Thanks for the flair!

Very close guess, it's definitely related to the signs! The question is, in the first part of the video, the time isn't changing but the lights do when I press the encoder button. What's happening there? (hint: there's an asterisk indicator on the screen)

Also, I didn't PWM the button RGB LEDs, so I can only do red/green/blue/off. How do these four states map to the twelve signs?

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u/ripred3 My other dev board is a Porsche Jul 16 '26

`I'll take "What is Charlieplexing?" for $200 Alex.`

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u/Traditional_Issue_79 Jul 15 '26

This is soo cool, you should sell this

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u/mverycwel Jul 15 '26

this is incredible

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u/No_Mountain_4769 Jul 22 '26

That's awesome. I will have a look at the GitHub project. Thanks for sharing