AUTOSTAR INFORMATION Last updated: 16 January 2001

Homemade Autostar Cloning Kit

From:	rseymour@wolfenet.com (richard seymour)
You can run 497 Autostars without having the telescope attached.
They don't care.

Hence you could make a splitter (or Cloner?) HBX power cable
 consisting of two RJ45 8-wire connectors, and simply provide power 
  (anything between 9v to 16v would work) to the outer two pins.

The pin -closest- to the rs232 port is the +12v pin.
The pin -farthest- from the rs232 port is the ground pin.

Then connect the Meade 505's cloning cable between the two rs232 ports.

If you're building your own cloning rs232 cable, pins 1 and 2 swap
between the two Autostars, pin 4 (ground) is the same on both ends.
Pins 1 and 2 of the rs232 connector are the -farthest- from the HBX
socket.

Simply a pair of straight across (pin 1 to pin 1, UNLIKE the
HBX coil cord) rj45's, with the outer two wires tapped into/onto
for power.

(actually, it'd be best to -cut- the rest of the wires
(other than 1 and 8) to avoid battles on the I2C bus...

Cloning takes (really!) 5 minutes.
It runs at 125k baud, hence 12 times faster than downloading.

--dick

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