ZWO EAF

[Astrodad]

Just picked myself up one of these and have to say for the price and ease of install its a great piece of kit. I've gone from not being a fan of electronic focusers to having two now!

[Gina]

I make my own but interesting that ZWO are producing one.

[AstronomyUkraine]

Posted by: @Gina

I make my own but interesting that ZWO are producing one.

I have the ZWO, but they have issues. One of them is terrible backlash, mine has 100 steps of backlash. You get what you pay for, and they are half the cost of a moonlite, and once the backlash is compensated for, they do a great job.

[Feock]

I have 2 ZWO eaf's and they really are very good, for the money. But they are not perfect and do develop backlash issues over time. Nina and some of the other focusers can deal with this very well. I have a few different telescopes for different targets and I prefer to have a dedicated focuser for each scope.  

 

Gina made the comment about building your own focusers and it is my preferred approach. The motor in the EAF must be tiny and it does struggle on larger payloads. I have made 4 focusers now using the NEMA 14 & 17 motors and Arduino UNO. It is amazingly cheap to build a very powerful focuser and I have one for my C11, 300mm newtonian and 150mm RC and they work with the same software via Ascom as the ZWO product but with a lot more power and precision. Above is an example on my C11 scope.

 

Many people choose the very capable project by Rob Brown  https://sourceforge.net/projects/arduinoascomfocuserpro2diy/files/myFocuserPro2M/  but this does require some technical skills.

My preference is to build http://www.scopefocus.info/arduino-focuser-2 which has minimal construction issues and can be built for less than £40 The scopefocus project does not implement micro stepping and does not have ambient temperature measurement which has not been an issue for me.

 

Ross

 

[DaveS]

Interesting.

I considered the ZWO focuser but in the end went for the Sesto Senso as it clamps directly to the fine focus bush without having to faff about with brackets.

[pharscape]

I've just purchased the ZWO EAF go with a 61EDPH also on order. I saw the combination on Cuiv the lazy geek's youtube, it impressed me. It has its issues but it is compact and its not ridiculously priced compared to some out there. 

I normally use Skywatcher DC focusers controlled by my own electronics. The last was based on an ESP32 so had a WiFi web-interface, it had enough processing power to manage PWM heater controllers too.  That project has stalled as I'm actually out in the garden at night for once!

When summer returns I'll get the soldering iron out again.