Ascom control of Garage Door Opener

[blinky]

OK, Ordered the garage door opener last night It seems to have wiring to accept a key switch to trigger opening/shutting of the roof and I really want this to be tied into Ascom so I can use CCD Commander to park the scope and shut the roof. I have an arduino board but have not done much with it but am also hoping to use a rain sensor to auto park and shut the roof as well. So I am wondering if anybody has interfaced a garage door opener with Ascom/CCD Commander and how they did it!

[Sp@ce_d]

OK, Ordered the garage door opener last night It seems to have wiring to accept a key switch to trigger opening/shutting of the roof and I really want this to be tied into Ascom so I can use CCD Commander to park the scope and shut the roof. I have an arduino board but have not done much with it but am also hoping to use a rain sensor to auto park and shut the roof as well. So I am wondering if anybody has interfaced a garage door opener with Ascom/CCD Commander and how they did it!

Well, I'm also interested to hear as I'm going to be doing the same for total automation. Which opener did you go for? My roofs quite heavy though so might need a sliding gate opener.

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[blinky]

I went for this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/231033506521?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

Says it will pull 70KGs

[gary1968]

Lazy, lazy, lazy...... lol. You need to get out of your big chair and under a dark sky Craig...

Gaz

[blinky]

I did go out last night with the heq5 and the SCT for a look at the sky :-). Saw M13,M31, double cluster, owl cluster but to be honest I was a little disappointed, I don't think it was too transparent a sky but there is a lot of light pollution, I think I will keep this for dark sky visits.

[FraserClarke]

I've written a custom dome controller for ASCOM, and that was not too tricky. Obviously the hardware interface is different, so can't help there, but the ASCOM dome control template includes functions for a sliding roof "dome". So it should be fairly easy to do that, once you've got the hardware interfaces sorted. Once you have the ASCOM "dome" driver for the roof, It should be trivial to interface that with CCD commander.

We 'solved' the rain/cloud problem by having the overall control software respond to rain/cloud warnings (from an AuroraTech cloud sensor) and shut the dome via software. It would be much nicer to have a hard link into the actual dome control hardware, so that it would shut even if the control computer had crashed. That's on my to-do list!

[blinky]

The hardware interface.... I want to send something to the Arduino over the USB Port, to tell it to close. I assume I just look at the demo code, then change the function that closes the roof to send data over the serial port?

[FraserClarke]

Yeah. The ASCOM template will have a function in it called "ShutDome" -- or something like that, can't remember the correct syntax! Within that function, you need to put all the relevant commands to make that happen. We use a "phidget" as our interface board -- v similar to arduino, just a different manufacturer. The digital outputs of the phidget are wired to the dome relay, to electronically 'press the buttons'.

So, the psuedo-code for our "ShutDome" function goes something like;

+ Check the phidget is connected

+ Stop all other motions

++ Set output 3 high

++ wait 100ms

++ Set output 3 low

+ Start the dome closing

++ Set output 1 high

++ wait 100ms

++ Set output 2 high

+ Set a loop going for 120 seconds (time it takes for the dome shutter to fully close)

+ Whilst the loop is going, check we don't get any interupts

++ If the loop finishes without any interupts, set the shutter status to "closed"

++ If we got an interupt, stop the shutter motion and set the status to "error"

You'll mainly just need to work out how to send the USB commands to the arduino -- sure there is a library to do this!

What language are you planning to use? CSharp seems to be a preferred one for ASCOM, and I have to say I found it really nice to develop in...

[blinky]

Yeah, will be c# thanks for the info, sound doable....

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