Re: [guide-user] Re: Mechanical error correction for scopes

Jeff Medkeff Dec 18, 2002

At 03:15 PM 12/18/2002 -0500, you wrote:



>To hop on the bandwagon what about interfacing
>Giude with the new Losmandy Gemini mounts?

While we are on the subject of telescope drivers and pipe-dream requests,
I've got more than two dozen clients with a perceived "serious" need for a
star-charting program that supports generic ACL telescopes. There is some
other star-charting software that supports ACL, but not very consistently
well. ACL seems to be a not-very-well-standardized standard, or maybe a
fast-and-loosely supported standard. I don't make my living selling other
peoples' stuff - I'd just like to be able to tell these guys to go buy
Guide (or <ahem> some other appropriate package that will actually run
their telescope) for casual dinking around on their tens- to hundreds- of
thousands of dollars research telescopes.

That said, there is an ACL driver which does very nicely at controlling
these scopes, and it is the ASCOM ACL driver:

http://ascom-standards.org/developer.html

I use this driver as the low-level interface for these scopes'
full-robotic, partially-robotic, and remote-operation high-level software.
If Guide were to emulate this driver then it would do the job. I.e., what I
am suggesting is "ignore the ACL standard and do what this driver does"
because the driver works, and the standard doesn't always. The ACL driver
source is open.

That said, if there were a Guide pass-through to the ASCOM drivers, that
would be *very* handy. Of course I'm non-discriminatory here - it would be
handy in almost any other star charting software out there. These drivers
already comprise a Losmandy Gemini driver, so there's instant support for
two requested telescopes with one coding/testing cycle. I know a lot about
the programming of this in the context of Microsoft compilers - writing a
pass-through or wrapper could be trivially simple or potentially
nightmarish, depending on what the WATCOM compiler makes/allows you to do.
In any case, I'm desperately interested in new ACL support, I don't really
care how it gets there!


--
Jeff Medkeff
Sierra Vista, Arizona
http://www.roboticobservatory.com/jeff/