Yoddha

Thank you!

The auto-focusing beta is here Anyone that wants to join?

Take a look here: http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/222399-beta-testers-needed-episode-2/?hl=%2Bauto%26%238208focusing

I'm giving my best to release a beta version of the APT auto-focusing somewhere in the next week

Aaaah that one

I have it in my To-Do list but auto-focusing is on the top

Dave_D, give some more explanation about the idea

My application wasn't really intended to be a proper client just a test program to make troubleshooting the Ascom driver & arduino a bit more interactive. That said it was a useful exercise in getting to know how to create a client. I may introduce a minimum position as the negative positions are a bit strange to deal with. The main issue I have outstanding with the driver is getting the .NET setup project to auto-register the dll. Any advice there would be appreciated. It seems to work fine on my dev box but others have reported it doesn't work on their systems and manual registration is needed.

Sorry, I didn't struggle with the driver setup yet

The prototype was made with Ardoino Mega kit. We had plans to release a How-To-Do-It documentation, to publish the sketch and the ASCOM driver but none of us found the time  Whoever I'll be happy to share all the information and experience you need

In the ASCOM documentation there is no word about negative position, but in the same time it doesn't provide possibility to define the minimum position. It expects to be 0... From the client applications like APT is expected to provide safety for the hardware and not attempt to move the focuser to extreme positions because this can cause to hardware damage and the only feedback is the value of the position property...

Dave in our project we store the position in the EEPROM storage, which makes the things much easier

Because this memory has limited life, there is a timer that is started when you push the button and after a certain time it checks if you still hold the button, if not it stores the position. With the ASCOM driver it is easier. After the Go To command just write the position

One more trick is that after storing a position I read it back to be sure that it is stored correctly and if the memory is corrupted am starting to use a new one With 100k average "write" cycles and 2 bytes for position (0-65535) you can store 2.5 million position changes in just 50+2 bytes The two bytes are to keep the address where position is stored...

Park/Unpark feature is very handy and even easier to be implemented

Looking at your beautiful cases, I'm little bit ashamed to show mine but ... here it is - my home made case

The body is cardboard box from a couple of tea cups. The green stuff that is my main safety material is "knee pad" which is an inch thick, soft material, harder than foam rubber but still soft and gentle (saw it in the clearance section of one supermarket and told - this can be used for something ). The green stuff is glued with hot silicon little bit above the bottom of the box which was covered with thick old school mouse pad Above the EP is normal foam rubber which is cut because of the taller diagonal and 9mm Nagler.

So that's it, my wife put a cork folio outside and it was done. It is not fancy, but keep all things safe, in compact form. I have a soft rucksack for this box, my WO 66SD (without the case, in foam rubber sleeve) all other small things that are needed for grab-and-go or for normal observing...

With puck foam, things can be much more simpler, but I don't know where to find it here...