Powered ground board

Any one out there ever make a powered ground board? I know that StellarCat makes one but at nearly $200 I thought I might try to make one myself.
Any help would be uh...helpful

I bought the one from StellarCat and now know what they are like. It would not be hard to make one using common brush sets from alternators or starters and a copper plate. Very simple spring loaded contacts are used with two to make sure there is constant contact. Two metal rings and two sets of brushes would do nicely. The power is a plug in one of the feet and the wires then go to the brush assembly and the center post. But there is no need for the center post to be powered if two rings were used.

Since are a number of plans for these ground boards available on the Web and guys in my Club have successfully built them, I decided to give it a try myself on one of my scope building projects. After all, it looked straightforward, and I'm a reasonably handy guy.

What a nightmare it turned out to be-- I spent *far* more time on this than any other single aspect of building that particular scope. It ultimately took me four generations of designing and re-building to get something that would reliable pass an adequate amount of current to power my on-board devices. Maybe I just took a wrong turn or had back luck, but it was enough to convince me to go back to hanging an on-board battery on my subsequent ATM projects.

It reminded me that Occam's Razor (or "keep it simple, stupid") applies to ATM'ing. :S

You can see the sordid details of my various trials towards the bottom of this page of my web site.
http://jimrichberg.com/astronomy/Natasha%20Structure.htm

Jim