Just a quick update this morning.

Yesterday, as part of my imaging setup, I ordered a EQ6 SynScan and a EQDIR.

This gives me the option of both running with the FTDI USB<->serial chip (used by the ATIK 16ic and the ATIK filterwheel) and writing a transport plugin that will be available to all vendor plugins to support the EQDIR chip (I'm assuming this will either be FTDI or another popular and easily supported chip).

I'm concentrating on the restructured plugin manager at the moment which is far more object orientated - using a proper class hierarchy to share common functionality between the vendor plugin manager and the transport plugin manager.

The USB Transport manager will handle the connection of the a USB device, offering it to the vendor plugin manager with the device name - allowing the vendor plugins to say "yes I support that device". It will do this via the plugin property file which allows some tweaking for the user but also means the only the plugins that are needed are loaded (Objective-C runtime cannot unload run-time loaded classes so having them all in memory and unused is a waste).

The USB Transport is instantiated and the Vendor Plugin manager then loads up the plugins ready and away it goes as the device becomes available to the application.