Straight rod barn door tracker

I'm moving forward with building my straight rod barn door tracker since I couldn't get good results with the curved rod one.  I found a couple of very good sites with lots of information.  ZZJ's barn door tracker provides a lot of information and good design theory.  He also provides a nice program in C++ to calculate delays for the loop.  The only problem is it's for an ATTiny85 MCU instead of an Arduino.  Rather than try to translate the code from one to the other and figure out the differences in timing, I went with a design based on another tracker by a user who goes by 0x05 on Reddit.  I based my design on the code he provided and added some additional functionality.  It took a bit of thinking to work out the math for my delay timings, but I think I've got it figured out.  

This one's got a 12" threaded rod which should provide me with about 2 1/4 hours of tracking before I need to reset.  For the motor mount and pivots, I found some materials at ePlastics, which is actually a local shop for me.  I used a 5/8" Delrin rod, for a 12" piece it was under $2.  For the blocks, I tried to find some nylon as others have used, but the shop didn't have any scraps and a small sheet was ridiculously expensive.  Instead, I found a 3"x6"x1" scrap of polyethylene for $2.  Perfect material for this.  It machines really well on a table saw and drill press.  Just don't try to sand it much, it gets very fuzzy.

 Yes, my prototype board still looks like a rat's nest.  In there I've got a SainSmart Nano V3 Arduino compatible and a breakout board for an A4988 stepper motor driver (similar to the one from Polulo, but for only a couple of bucks off eBay).  This driver allows 1/16 microstepping, which really smooths out the motor.  I've also hooked up a start/stop/rewind button, "fast" mode switch to run it at a much faster rate (possibly for drift aligning, if that works out), and a limit switch so when it's powered on, the tracker can rewind to a known position.

This all seems to work great at the moment, but I have come across one problem.  My tripod is too wobbly.  It's great for mounting just the camera, but the mount is pretty heavy, so any little touch makes it wiggle all over.  So, next I'll be building a nice, sturdy tripod for my mount.  I think I've come up with a nice design that I threw together in SketchUp.

It will be plenty sturdy and will provide fine adjustments for altitude and azimuth for setting polar alignment.

More pictures and info to come once I've build the tripod and get everything working.