Can someone help a guy on the edge???

[Digz]

Its taken me several weeks to research and now Ive finally plunged into it - connecting my mount to my Mac using Stellarium. It should be possible to control my mount direct from Stellarium on my Mac without any third party interface. THe problem is nothing seems to be happening and this where I hope someone can help me out.

Here's what I have:

Macbook Pro (Mac OS 10.6.2)

Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro Synscan Mount (Ver 03.25)

Serial to USB converter from Maplin (drivers installed)

Stellarium 0.10.5

This is what I have done to date:

1. Installed the Serial to USB driver for my cable and configured Stellarium to have a mount connected directly to it;

2. I have entered a name under the telescope configuration menu;

3. I have tried two device model options: Sykwatcher Synscan (version 3 or Later) and Celestron Nexstar (Compatible) - the latter being recommended on Stellarium and within the NEQ6 Pro user guide;

4. I have found the USB to Serial device name in terminal and copied that to the serial port box under device settings;

5. I have added field of view indicators for completeness;

6. I have switched the Synscan into PC Direct mode (and tried it without this)

Here is where I have the issues. I can connect to the mount and Stellarium confirms this however I do not get a reticule with the scope name and I cannot slew at all, either with the manual slew (cmd+0) or when pointed at a target and hitting cmd+1.

Am I missing something fundamental? I hope it is an easy fix as I am very keen to take the next step into controlling my mount from Stellarium.

Thanks for any help and advice offered.

Yours, a man on the edge

[Digz]

Surely someone here has tried this?

Anyone?

Echo.....echo.......echo.......

[Midpoint]

Have you double checked the device name? I haven't done this in a while but a seem to remember the USB to Serial adapter adding two entries to /dev and only one of them will work with Stellarium.

[MikeP]

Never touched a Mac, so take what follows with a pinch of salt.

Have a look here ... http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-discussion/112663-stellarium-ascom.html .... for advice for someone trying to use Stellarium - basically you need Stellarium Scope.

I control my EQ6 from Windows and I can use any planetarium program that issues ASCOM commands. What I use to "map" the ASCOM commands to something the mount can understand is EQMOD or EQASCOM as it seems to be called now. I'd have thought you'd need that or an equivalent.

Also, as I understand it, the voltages / wires that stuff gets sent to the mount as when it goes as serial communication (which your USB to serial will effect) is not what the mount wants to hear. So you have two choices - I use a USB->serial adapter and then a little gadget called an EQDIR that does the final translation - the other choice is the one you are trying ie using the PC Direct mode of the handset.

I suggest you join the EQMOD and or Stellarium Yahoo groups and have a look there to see if you can get some clues.

Mike

[Digz]

Thanks for the help Midpoint and Mike.

@Midpoint - I take it you have done this with a Mac before? I didnt notice there were two entries but I will double check this tomorrow when I have time to connect the scope again.

@Mike - Thanks for the input. As far as I am aware ASCOM isnt supported on Mac which is the same as Stellarium Scope. Believe me I have tried all these avenues. I was under the impression that Stellarium could control the scope directly without the need for EQMOD or ASCOM interfaces.

BTW I have joined the Stellarium and EQMOD groups. I have also directly asked the question to the Stellarium developers in the hope for some resolutions soon which I will post here in due course.

[the_laughing_crow]

You could dual boot your computer... will only add 2 seconds to boot time and then you can choose which OS to boot into: XP/LINUX for astro, MAC OS for everything else.

Not ideal I know but it would work.

[MikeP]

Sorry I couldn't help. I agree that Stellarium has a primitive telescope interface where you need to designate the EQ6 as a Celestron something or the other, but I've never tried it.

FWIW, I've tried controlling my mount using EQMOD with Starry Night Pro, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, SkyMap Pro and slightly differently with AstroPlanner. They all have different strengths and weaknesses as applications but when it comes to working with telescope control, I'd rank Stellarium last. Just my opinion.

Mike

[Midpoint]

I don't have my laptop to hand right now, but I did manage to get my Mac hooked up to my NexStar mount once before. I'll take a look at my config tomorrow and let you know how I have it set up.

What make is your serial adapter as the driver may affect what's added to /dev. I ended up using a downloaded driver rather than one that came with the adapter.

[darkly]

Have a look at some of the other threads on here, I'm sure I read some where that the serial to usb converters aren't all equal.

TBH I can't remember where but some one changed to a different converter and up it all came with-out needing EQMOD

[Digz]

Thanks guys.

@the_laughing_crow - I do have parallels and did want to try a windows version to check everything was working however I cannot seem to get Stellarium to work on Windows 7 (64bit)

@MikeP - on the contrary, what you have offered is very useful and I appreciate you thoughts and opinions.

@Midpoint - if you would let me know what happens that would be very much appreciated. My Serial to USB adapter is a generic one from Maplin, I cant seem to see any make on it. Interestingly enough I did read about downloading a driver to get it to work but as the adapter came with one so I didnt bother - If you could let me know what driver you downloaded I can give that a go.

@Darkly - thanks for the input, I have searched and searched both here, the stellarium website and google to find the answers hence being a man on the edge....

As an aside I have downloaded a load of cpp files with a makefile which apparently can be combined to produce three scope servers for nexstar which may help my issue? See this page:

Telescope Control (client-server) - Stellarium

[Midpoint]

I'm currently having my house plastered so my scope is packed away under a pile books and a dust sheet, so I can't test if everything still works.

My USB adapter is a PL2303 based one and I used this driver:

Apple - Downloads - Drivers - PL2303 USB to Serial Driver

When plugged in, it adds the following devices to /dev:

/dev/cu.PL2303-000013FD

/dev/tty.PL2303-000013FD

To get it working in Stellarium, I have to ues the /dev/cu.PL2303-000013FD device.

[Digz]

Thanks Midpoint. I thought this might have been the driver. I did just download it and install it but when I tried to open Stellarium to add the new device it just kept crashing!!

I did notice however that only one device was listed not two - should that make a difference? Also it seemed to be missing the cu. in the dev list i.e. it was /dev/PL2303-000013FD and not /dev/cu.PL2303-000012FD - should that make a difference?

Also, as I have installed the driver that came with the USB-Serial converter before installing this one - does this need to be removed? If so how the hell do I do that?

Sorry for all the additional questions but I think I might be getting somewhere

Ill try connecting my scope tomorrow with this new driver and see what happens.

[Midpoint]

You might need to remove the original driver first before installing the new driver. The 8 digits at the end of the device name shouldn't matter as they are just a "random" id. It's the bit before PL2303 that's the important bit as it identifies how the device can be used (I think, in a grossly over simplified way).

The driver+adapter combo you're currently using doesn't seem to do this though, so I'm not sure what to suggest. Maybe the disc has some instructions on it for uninstalling the driver?

[MikeP]

I'm not sure if we are talking Macs or PCs now but with Windows you just drill down to the device in Device Manager and "update" the driver.

Probably more useless advice.

Mike

[Damien]

Hello,

I have used Stellarium with a synscan goto mount before, I had the same problem as you although i was using a PC. It turned out to be a driver problem, windows installed it's own driver for some reason and not the driver that came with the serial device i bought (also from Maplins) think i paid £20 for that. Anyway, use the Skywatcher Synscan profile as it's now available in the latest version of stellarium.

One thing I remember, the first time is tried it was I couldn't get the thing to slew to any target. Make sure you turn the interface on using the telescope icon in Stellarium, select an object with your mouse and then press CTRL + 1 (Apple + 1 if Mac) and it should slew to that object if your polar alingment is set up correctly. Also make sure you Polar Align the mount before attaching to Stellarium.

Sorry I can't be of more help than that.

Good Luck and clear skies.

Damien

[Digz]

Thanks Midpoint. I need to figure out how to uninstall this driver now

Hi Mike Im afraid that time it was useless, lol - We should be talking Mac!!! Still, I appreciate the input

Damien, thanks for the response. Are you saying that you have used the driver that windows installed as opposed to the one that came with the adapter? I reckon that could be the key. I shall see if I can get anything to happen, once I find out how to uninstall the original driver.

[Damien]

no, i originally thought the adapter wouldn't need the driver to work and plugged it in anyway. Windows (Vista) installed one of it's own drivers. it's only when i removed the windows driver and used the driver that came with the cable that the thing worked. Sorry, I know how frustrating this can be. Good luck.

Hope you get it sorted!!

BTW have you got acces to a PC to see if you can get it to work that way?

[Digz]

Cheers Damien. I originally tried it with the driver that came with the adapter and nowt happened. I too hope I get it sorted

I do have parallels on this machine however Stellarium doesnt seem to work on it (Im running Windows 7 64bit) as I was kinda hoping to verify everthing this way.

[Midpoint]

Digz, take a look in /System/Library/Extensions, you might find the driver in there. My driver is installed as osx-pl2303.kext and the instructions for uninstalling that driver can be found here:

Mac OS X Pl2303 Driver Project

Maybe you can use these instructions to work out how to uninstall your driver?

Just so that I fully cover myself, back up everything before you start and if you're not confident with what you're doing, don't touch it as you could break something! I'm not a Mac expert, just someone who likes to tinker

[Digz]

**UPDATE**

Well the help I was getting from Stellarium has ground to a halt, so today I tried using CdC and Ascom on Parallels and this all works thus I can control my mount through this method.

Not perfect and not what I want to result to doing but at least I have confirmed the cable and connections work and that I can control my scope albeit with CdC on Windows.

Lets hope I can get the Mac issue sorted.