NickK

Quick test with the Titan - all ok :D

Will try the 383 later.

Restructuring complete :D

Next up is retesting everything..

Wheee.... I've almost completed the restructuring :D I hope tomorrow to have it up and running if I have a little time after doing the front garden!

Here's the crop from the processed image (pc):

The video upload has finished :D

GacWol1KbpU

Ok, just uploading a youtube video... should make it quicker!

Varooom...

Well I've spent my time split between domestic tasks (apart from the 14th when I ended up cooking a 3 course meal for two... that took 4 hours!) and progressing the work.

The 383L support is coming along nicely, the slow transfer rate has been resolved and there has been a considerable amount of restructuring within the source to make it more multiple-OS friendly. It should be straight forward now to create the Windows, OSX and Linux drivers with a large portion of the same code. The only casualty has been the C support in favour of C++ for the internal core.

David and I have agreed we should also be releasing the initial alpha version of AOSX sooner rather than later..

I'll run up a video of my development progress shortly..

I did some grab'n'go with the titan last night as I was looking through the cloud and using the Vixen A80mf on the porta mount with the Titan attached looking at the moon.

The vixen is 900mm fl and using a flimsy porta mount with the exposure time of almost instant resulted in no blurring! Also the auto black levelling seemed to drop the noise level to zero!

Just posted the 383L off for repair.. so hopefully I should have it back quickly :D

Two options:

1) Have each user download the firmware from a running camera once - but this would require the user to be using windows. This would, naturally, mean that each user would legally be making a copy of 'software' that they're already using..

2) Write my own 8051 controller firmware and opensource that too. This isn't new for me as I've written Blackfin based firmware (another more powerful controller chip)..

Hmm let me think about it...

Currently the code base is going though some flux - specifically the interfaces. I'll blog a picture of the initial architecture which will help give some clarity.

Although I can't work on this tonight, the EQDIR chip is confirmed as a Prolific Technology Inc. chip (a major competitor to FTDI). It's well known and should be straight forward to incorporate support.

The only down side with the EQDIR device is that HiTechAstro have not configured a USB Manufacturer String, Product String or Serial Number String. This means we'll be matching on "Prolific Technology Inc."+"USB-Serial Controller"+NONE and so will not be able to differentiate between any Prolific-based devices without resorting to getting the user to manually configure which is which if they connect more than one Prolific device with the same identity.

ATIK correctly configure the manufacturer, product and the serial number so it's possible to differentiate between an FTDI-based camera and an FTDI-based filter wheel then automatically sense which configuration to associate.