Bill, Mel, Markus,

We would need some form of gating once the positions, rates and time stamps
have
been sent off on the COM port. Would you use the LX200 slew go command to
synchronize/gate? Would it be possible for guide to compute the positions
and rates for that given moment when the gate is sent (look ahead
computation
- fractional second)? If so, perhaps it IS possible to drop the rates after
all,
since it would be a slowly changing quantity and one iteration delay on
remote scope controller rate computations are not troublesome.

As for time stamps, we would need a running time stamp, perhaps on a second
basis (no need to send minutes and hours), as in #?XX.X#, where ? is the
time
stamp command and XX.XX are the seconds (0.00 to 99.99). The remote scope
controller could easily synchronize its own 100 second clock to it. Thus,
the
delta time would be computed by the remote and be synchronized on account of
each slew go gate per sample and it would provide a 'pseudo' absolute time
signal
as well.

There would still be jitter on account of COM servicing on both ends.
A method of getting rid of all jitter would be to buffer at the remote
a look ahead stream from Guide a few seconds ahead, but we'd still have to
find a way to synchronize the full clocks on both ends. Mind you, this last
step could be dropped as gentle initial manual guiding at the scope once the
slews have begun could remove the offset.

What bothers me with this approach is that is moves further away from
a standard that would interfere with regular LX200 users, but something
along this direction would provide a 'stiff' link between Guide and scope.

What is the opinion on this one? A variation of it perhaps?

Cheers