With the advent of electronics in everything, amateur astronomy has never been easier. Telescope mounts that point in the direction of any astronomical object automatically have been around for decades, and the Telrad – a device that paints 0.5, 2, and 4 degree diameter circles in your finder scope’s field of view are available if you’re just too cool for letting a robot do your job. [Christoph]’s explorad takes the concept of a Telrad and adds a somewhat more electronic twist: it still displays the field of view circles, but adds highlighting of interesting astronomical objects from a custom telescope mount, a huge database, and a few sensors.
By far the biggest challenge to any homebrew finder of astronomical objects is figuring out where the observer is. Not only does [Cristoph] need to take into account the location on Earth (GPS helps with that), but also where North is (electronic compass), where the telescope is pointing (optical encoders on a two axis mount), but also the universal time and current sidereal time. Living on a rotating planet that orbits a sun makes for a lot of code.
The current progress on the star finder to beat all star finders is a bit of code that draws the ‘telrad circles’ and displays placeholders for each patch of sky with a small triangle. Tilting the device or turning the azimuth pot moves these triangles and loads new ones on the fly. Now the name of the game is a sky object database for all the astronomical objects [Cristoph] wants to view.
A few months ago, Google bought a $3.2 billion dollar thermostat in the hopes it would pave the way for smart devices in every home. The Nest thermostat itself is actually pretty cool – it’s running Linux with a reasonably capable CPU, and adds WiFi to the mix for some potentially cool applications. 
While the most common use for a Raspberry Pi is probably a media center PC or retro game emulator, the Pi was designed as an educational computer meant to be an easy-to-use system in the hands of millions of students. Team 28 at Imperial College London certainly living up to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s expectations 
With The Hackaday Prize, you’re not just limited to one entry. Of course it would be better to devote your time and efforts to only one project if you’re competing for a trip to space, but if you’re [Necromant], you might be working on two highly related project that are both good enough for The Hackaday Prize
While the BeagleBone is usually compared to the Raspberry Pi, there are a few features that make the ‘Bone a vastly more capable single board computer. There is a small difference in the capabilities of the processor, but the real power of the BeagleBone comes from the PRUs available: two small cores that give the BeagleBone the hardware equivalent of bitbanging pins. [Texane] has put up two great tutorials for using the PRU in the BeagleBone that should be required reading for every BeagleBone owner.
