I'm working on a thing I'm calling TOASST, or the Tiny Open Android Smartphone-based Smart Telescope. The basic idea is to use a smartphone (often the best camera in your house) to do electronically assisted astronomy/astrophotography a la Seestar. I've been working on the solidworks design for a mount to hold a phone for about 3 weeks and started the Arduino firmware this week. Eventually I'll write a small android app to control the mount and coordinate astrophotography sessions, hosted via wifi hotspot so you can see the results coming in on another device.

This project started when my partner told me I couldn't buy a Seestar, so I decided "fuck it, I'll build my own!" It's still early days but I think there's something cool here. I'm designing the whole thing to be easy and cheap to print and build. I hope someday this will be the kind of project that a sufficiently motivated teenager will be able to build with minimal experience and an old smartphone; maybe it's healing my inner child, lol.