Scope Control
alpetersus Sep 29, 2004
I am, finally, getting around to upgrading my system from Guide7 to
Guide8. My system consists of a home built goto servo system running
through a Visual Basic control program. I use Win98 and the Windows
version of Guide. The scope control program, which also reads the
encoders, runs concurrently with the Windows version of Guide.
I use the altaz scope control option of Guide7 to provide RA and Dec
coordinates for aligning the scope and generating the goto points. I
do this by reading the slew.dat file that is generated by Guide when
I click on the Scope Pad "Slew Telescope" button. This eliminates
the need for any serial port connections. I think that all other
scope control options require the use of a serial port which, in my
case, would require two serial ports looped together - one to
interface with Guide and one to interface with my scope control
program. This slew.dat file option appears to also work in Guide8.
At times I would like to use the Slew Guide scope pad button so that
Guide8 shows me where the scope is pointed. However, using this
slew.dat file option I cannot figure out how to get Guide8 to read my
telescope position.
I believe that there used to be a Guide7(?) JMI encoder option which
would use a slew_out.dat file to obtain the encoder positions instead
of through a serial port. This option was enabled by putting an "enc
syst 4" on line 50 of the startup.mar file. This does not appear to
work in Guide8. Is this option available in Guide8? If so, how do I
implement it?
Also, is it possible to get both the JMI encoder option and the altaz
scope option to work at the same time (on occasion, I like having
that little red circle showing me where the telescope is pointing)?
One possible problem might be that the "Slew Telescope" button
controls both the turning on and off the little red circle for the
JMI option and it generates the slew.dat file for the altaz option.
Any help would be appreciated.
Al