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ajk

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    Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Astronomy and many things (but not all) ending with "ology"
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    Scotland

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  1. This is not what I am hearing:- http://indilib.org/forum/general/1303-did-something-really-stupid-now-cant-start-indi.html?start=6 What leads you to believe it's heading in that direction?
  2. Correct. I will do the work to ask Indi maintainers to pull it into their repo at some point, but before I do that I need at least another pair of eyeballs on it, that's where you come in I fully expect feedback from you in the form "this doesn't work", "this doesn't work as I expect" or "this is great! But can I also have it do foo as well please?". Lets get it polished up. Then we'll go for inclusion in the main code base of Indi
  3. https://github.com/A-j-K/hitecastrodcfocuser Note, I did an "in tree build" with the INDI source tree. The repo up there is an "out of tree" build. Let me know how you get on (please use the Github issue tracker and not this forum thread to discuss the driver, building and installing as that way future people will find the discussions we have in the right place, where the code is, buried in a forum here helps no future people )
  4. @Vox45 @JamesF @perfrej @Gina OK, I have a working version of the HitecAtroDCFocuser now. Well, it moves anyway. Can control the slew speed and number of steps. The HitecAstro software allows for the slew speed to be set from 1 to 100. I matched this. However, I have found that values below 25 don't appear to deliver enough power to the motor to overcome even it's own gear train (found with my Indi driver and their own branded software). However, I will leave the min/max at 1/100 as per their software as other people may have different tolerances on their hardware (btw, I am using a 10 Amp bench power supply so it's not a dead battery!). On a side note, I am going to start working on Indi more. In discussions with the maintainers I am starting by adding unit/integration tests and Travis CI integration. Fun times ahead
  5. Ah, this is pleasant music to my eyes (eh, did I mix my metas?). I'm a big fan of Github and it's Fork/PR development workflow.
  6. I will wait a day or two then. In the mean time you'll all be glad to hear I now have the USB HID Class Reports for controlling the focuser It was pretty basic. [edit: by reverse eng using an Ellisys Explorer. I haven't heard back for HitecAstro officially.]
  7. Which explains why Windows is so popular. And people get cross with Windows when it doesn't work. They have no idea how bad it can really get
  8. I always use 64-bit. It seems they have a package they simply cannot build for what ever reason and so 3rd Party code (full-indi) cannot be installed. On a side note I downloaded the code from SF (trunk) and I managed to build Indi Core at least. However, without being able to install kstars-bleeding (which itself needs indi-fiull) there's no point me carrying on with this. I will trash this VM and wait for the Kubuntu ISO to download and try that out. If that fails I'll have to email the maintainers. Not good given this is "step one" and many steps. Despite being a huge advocate of FOSS this is the one thing that annoys me about it, it's a time sink. And people complain about Windows. Windows "still wins" because a) it's easy and ii. for the most part "it just works" and doesn't totally sink your time (I've been at this ALL NIGHT and not jumped the first hurdle and I'm suppose to be a super-techie/developer/nurd, goodness help normal non-techie users)
  9. So, installing INDI. I had some Ubuntus lay about but failed to install, I noticed INDI wanted 15.04 minimum for their latest code. So, download 16.04 Ubuntu ISO. Hour later and the VM is running. Let's install INDI now.... root@ubuntu:~# apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa Latest INDI Library and drivers! More info: https://launchpad.net/~mutlaqja/+archive/ubuntu/ppa Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmp_y2chf3d/secring.gpg' created gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmp_y2chf3d/pubring.gpg' created gpg: requesting key 3F33A288 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com gpg: /tmp/tmp_y2chf3d/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created gpg: key 3F33A288: public key "Launchpad INDI" imported gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1) OK root@ubuntu:~# apt-get update <snipped lots of updates> root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install indi-full Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: indi-full : Depends: indi-asicam but it is not installable E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I believe this is the main reason people pay for Windows (whilst students with plenty of free time don't). If someone wants to let me know when Indi becomes installable on Ubuntu I will continue with the focuser driver development. (And please no, don't ask me to use another distro, if it doesn't work on Ubtunu it's "too exclusive" a requirement for me). [edit: yes, I Googled it and nothing obvious sprang up in the way of a fix for Indi. I guess I could get the source code and compile from scratch but I'd like the main user installs to at least work before putting effort into a project] [edit2: developer manual recommends Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/) for actual development. Downloading ISO now and will try that. If it works then this would be my recommended distro if you want to use Indi. If it doesn't work I'll ping the maintainers and bark at them a bit ]
  10. James, I know about the serial number etc. It's as @perfrej points out, it's ASCOM that hasn't been built to allow for arrays of similar devices so HitecAstro have had to work around the short coming by making them look like two different devices. And about the devices appearing in different places when you plug/unplug. True, but on Linux you can use the device mapper to use the vid/pid/serial-num to remount the device repeatedly in the same place Just Google for device mapper and serial ports and there will be plenty of howtos for doing that. I suspect INDI will probably handle arrays of similar devices better than ASCOM but I am yet to find out, cross that bridge when I get there.
  11. So ASCOM is the pinch point in it all. Not used Indy yet, we'll see if they have the same issue.
  12. @psamathe @Vox45 @JamesF For the record I have emailed/contacted HitecAstro. It would be way simpler if they gave me/us/whoever both permission and the specification of the device. Lets see what they say.
  13. I intend to. The focuser presents itself to the OS as a HID Class device and it loads up a standard driver anyway. All that needs reverse engineer here is the command structure they are using. In essence "what button press/wheel spin represents what control of the focuser?"). No bespoke USB code required so the Indy driver would be the natural route.
  14. @JamesF Thanks for the wikipedia reference but being an engineer and that text being lawyer speak it means nothing to me.
  15. Generally, if I cannot affords a lawyer to clarify this in court and I may loose I prefer not to engage.
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