Ascom Alpaca Remote Server with PHD2

[UKRoman]

Hi All,

Does anyone have any experience with using PHD2 to connect to a guide camera on a remote PC that presents Ascom cameras to a local network via Alpaca Remote Server?

I have a mini PC mounted on the telescope in my Observatory, to which my main / guide cameras, mount and focuser are all connected via USB. Alpaca Remote Server running on the mini PC is presenting dynamic Alpaca ASCOM drivers for these devices across my home network. I can use NINA to access the dynamic drivers to control the mount, main camera and focuser and things seem to be working ok (though I haven’t tried an imaging session yet). 
 

However I’m unable to access the dynamic Alpaca drivers for the guide camera or mount via PHD2. They just aren’t visible in the PHD2 equipment chooser. So far I haven’t been able to locate any information on whether or not PHD2 requires additional set up to be able to detect the drivers on the network. NINA uses a built-in listener function to allow the detection and selection of Alpaca devices from a network. But I haven’t seen anything equivalent in PHD2.

 

If anyone has any ideas on how to get PHD2 to ‘see’ the dynamic Alpaca drivers from a network (or any other workaround) I’d appreciate some tips. 
 

Thanks in advance  

 

Cheers 👍

 

Edited May 29 by UKRoman

[UKRoman]

I've discovered a fix for this, which I'll note here in case it helps anyone else in future.

Basically, it looks like the new Alpaca dynamic device drivers are given the same (or very similar) name as any equivalent locally hosted ASCOM drivers on the Remote PC. This appears to be confusing PHD2. So I used the ASCOM Profile Explorer utility to locate and change the name of the new Alpaca driver slightly, to distinguish it from the local ASCOM driver. Once the name is unique it shows up correctly in PHD2's device chooser drop-down, and PHD2 now works over Alpaca 🙂

Cheers

Edited May 29 by UKRoman