Comments on: Build Your Own Digital Setting Circles

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:51:59 +0000

Bradley, it looks like it would work (I think you’d want the -F model), but I’d have to take a closer look and try one out to know for sure. It’s worth pointing out that this device costs about twice what it would cost to pick up a USB-serial converter. Also, I think using this would make it harder to use bluetooth if you ever decided to go that way. You can easily purchase a bluetooth-serial adapter to plug right into the serial connector on the board, but you couldn’t do the same thing with a USB-bluetooth converter on the board (that converter will only work with a PC). This is the reason I’ve stuck with the serial interface on my board–it’s much easier to adapt to either USB or bluetooth. Once you modify the board by swapping out the serial for something else, you’re pretty-much stuck with whatever you swapped it for.

If you try this out, let me know how it works.

Dave

By: Bradley Roseberry

Bradley Roseberry — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:35:09 +0000

Dave, getting ready to purchase from Far Circuits. I was wondering if this USB-DB9 replacement would cause any problems?
http://www.copelandcommunications.com/Socket%20USB232.aspx

It looks like a direct replacement and the tech specs look like it will communicate with the MAX232.

Your thoughts?

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:44:27 +0000

Bent,

Yes, you’d need to realign for every observing session. There is no feature at this time to save the alignment for future use. I assume you have a permanently-mounted telescope?

Dave

By: Bent Wihlborg

Bent Wihlborg — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:33:57 +0000

Hi Dave

Have I overlooked something or are
there a memory function in your program,
or do I have to realign for every observing session?

Regards and clear skies- Bent

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:27:45 +0000

There shouldn’t be. There’s nothing in my driver software that should cause this to happen.

Dave

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:57:50 +0000

I currently have a Sky Commander hooked to my GEM mount. If I leave the unit on for more than 17 hours it will loose its alignment. Is there any time limit for keeping an alignment with your system if I leave it on and connected to a PC?

Thanks, Josh

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:29:07 +0000

Braley,

Yes, my driver handles all the coordinate transformations internally, so it should work with Astroplanner.

Dave

By: Braley Roseberry

Braley Roseberry — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:53:43 +0000

THanks for the site and your labors.

I am building my own Goto, GEM using a Televue Systems Mount as the starting point. I am already an avid user of Astroplanner and was hoping to use your DSC PIC board to do the encoder communication.

Astroplanner is ASCOM compliant, but Astroplanner does not do the Alt/Az to RA/DEC matrix math. i.e. Astroplanner will not work with any of the Tangent boxes comercially available.

Does your software do the interpolation?

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:45:53 +0000

Arno,

Apparently, some port drivers don’t write their port names into the registry correctly. I’m going to see if I can compensate for this in my software. In the mean time, you should be able to work around this problem like this:

Open up your astro software and access the telescope settings. In the setup dialog for my driver, go ahead and select one of the scrambled entries, and fill out the rest of the dialog correctly and save your settings. Then close your astro software and launch the ASCOM Profile Explorer (under the Tools menu under ASCOM 6.0 on the start menu). Navigate to “ASCOM.EncoderDSC.Telescope” in the “Telescope Drivers” section. On the right-hand side of that screen you’ll see the settings that you just saved. You can manually edit the Port entry to correct it. Once you’ve done that, you can launch your astro software again and the driver should use the correct port, as long as you don’t use the setup dialog for my driver to change any settings. If you have to re-open the setup dialog for my driver, you’ll have to go back and manually edit the Port value again.

Hope this helps -

Dave

By: Arno

Arno — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:56:47 +0000

Hi David,

installed ASCOM 6(older not aval anymore) and your
latest version. On a Windows7 PC i cant communicate with
COM as the listbox(Serial Port) in your Digital Circle Setup Dialog shows scrambled entries. I.e. “COM11c” “next time
“COM11+” etc…. therefore establishing connecion not possib “COM Port not found”….. any idea how to solve that? – many thanks and best regards Arno