Adding GPS to Starsense (for Skywatcher) via USB port of PC

[Pat Warborg]

Hi,

I would like to add a GPS to my Starsense for Skywatcher setup, because I'm tired of punshing in date and time on every start up. Not that tired though, that I would readily spend more than 200€ just for that... :-)

Last night, I found an interesting link: http://www.stargps.ca/. Might be interesting for other people as well who are looking into adding GPS capability to their rigs. Seems less expensive than the vendor's GPSs (especially in the case of Celestron). They also provide information on how to connect any existing GPS to various mounts. That was actually the most interesting part for me!

I did some tests last night with the redirect.exe tool I downloaded from stargps. Seems that indeed I can just redirect the NMEA input from my cheap amazon GPS (I still had one around) to another UBS port. The tool does recognize both the GPS and the STarsense hc and happily connects them, but the Starsense just does not seem to use the GPS data provided to it. The website claims it should work that way. Did anybody try this before and can share hands-on experience?

Thanks,

Pat

[Dr_Ju_ju]

I use something like this (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/VK-162-Notebook-USB-GPS-Receiver-Navigation-Module-UBLOX7-RasPi-Win7-8-CE-Linux-/302052380581?hash=item4653b98fa5:g:uGUAAOSw8RJXCNFX)

works a treat for CDC\Stellarium etc....

[Pat Warborg]

Indeed that is about what I got as well. Works well with pc based programs. Challenge is to get the gps data into the starsense hc...

Thanks,

Pat

[Dr_Ju_ju]

Hi Pat,

By the look at the info on http://www.celestron.uk.com/productinfo.php/accessories/navigational/skysync_gps_accessory/3526 Celestron's over priced GPS unit, plugs into a spare AUX port, so I suspect that to use a cheaper USB device, you'd require some way to convert the received data to something that can be recognised by the Starsense..... 

[Pat Warborg]

10 hours ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

Hi Pat,

By the look at the info on http://www.celestron.uk.com/productinfo.php/accessories/navigational/skysync_gps_accessory/3526 Celestron's over priced GPS unit, plugs into a spare AUX port, so I suspect that to use a cheaper USB device, you'd require some way to convert the received data to something that can be recognised by the Starsense..... 

Hi Julian,

That's right! And I learned in the meantime that there is a NexStar protocol which is used by the Celestron GPS for the communication with the hc. The AUX ports seem to use yet another protocol... Unfortunately, I have not a lot experience with programming PCs (especially with USB ports involved)...

There seems to be an "option" to connect a USB GPS to a PC running NexRemote and NexGPS and use the GPS that way. What I don't know (yet) is if the time and date data resides in the mount or the hc. In the former case, I could start up with NexRemote and NexGPS, get the data in and then switch to the Starsense hc. Anyway, this doesn't sound much more comfortable than punching in a few numbers manually...

Pat