jlecomte/ascom-telescope-cover

Open Source ASCOM-Compatible Telescope Cover For Astrophotography

ascom-telescope-cover's Issues

Merge some of your projects

Hello Julien,

No issue, no pull request, just a thought. My name is Jean-Francois, I live in France, and I am a (low level) astrophotographer.
I use NINA and Ascom devices. My setup is EQ6-R / Askar FRA600 /ASI2600color.

I was seeking for an automated dust cap for my telescope and I found your videos ! (Dark Sky Geek)
You did such a great job for 2 projects in which I am interested : dust cap and focuser.
I am not a developer and I discovered your channel today !
I bought hardware stepper-motors drivers called TIC from Pololu and I did a small GUI to drive manually stepper-motors.
This was easy, but to integate TIC with NINA (native or Ascom) is much to dffificult for me.

A stepper-motor and a stepper motor is much less expensive that any Zwo, Pegasus or else equipment.

If for any reason, you plan to use Pololu TIC hardware to drive stepper-motors for your new projects, please let me know.

Sincerely

Jean-Francois
[email protected]

WriteProfile autoDetectComPort alway be true

Not working in NINA

NINA doesn't work with your ASCOM driver. It can connect and open the cover fine. But after asking NINA to open the cover, it times out, preventing me from closing the cover.

I ran the driver along with NINA in Visual Studio to investigate this and I think I know what happens. When lauching the driver, NINA has the switch defaulted to Off and the cover is closed by default of course. All is well for now. When activating the switch to open the cover, it does so and NINA starts polling the GetSwitchValue method and it expects it to return a 1 when the switch is ON ( i.e cover open). Your driver outputs the opposite. It happens here :

     public double GetSwitchValue(short id)
        {
            Validate("GetSwitchValue", id);
            tl.LogMessage("GetSwitchValue", $"GetSwitchValue({id}) - not implemented");
            return QueryDeviceState() ? 1.0 : 0.0;
        }

So the solution is simple :
return QueryDeviceState() ? 0.0 : 1.0;
and also
internal static string traceStateDefault = "true";

Maybe a switch driver is not the best option for this application.
Personnaly I would have used a Flatplanel template for the driver, instead of a switch. Even if you don't have an actual flat panel in the cover, the template provides the methods for the motorised part. So you can just leave the flat side in the code and just implement the motor part.
Also I already have a power box occupying the switch part of NINA, so it's not helpful to have to change driver just to move the cover.

2 servos instead of one ?

Hello Julien,

Vincent from France. Many thanks for your project ! I'm currently making a cover for my remote telescope.
This is just an idea. Is it possible to control 2 servos from the Xiao at the same time instead of one ? My telescope has a diameter of 250 mm and I'm not able to make a dust cap in just one piece. I need to use 2 parts in shapes of half-circle.
Do you think it could be difficult to add this feature, by changing the Xiao firmware only ?

I think I will try for fun !

Vincent

Thanks for this project

Dear Julien,

Thanks for making the cover as well as flat panel available.

Converted the cad files to Fusion360 to make them fit my scope. Combined both flat panel and cover functionality.

Honesty my mistake of not having used an SAMD21 / Seeeduino XIAO before. What a powerful tiny piece of electronics.

Instead the usual servo lib I'm using one called slowServo allowing good control of the speed and it is working asynchronously and not blocking when servo moves. It therewith better follows the ASCOM specs like reporting status when moving.

The fact of fast closure move on power-up when cover is not closed I could overcome by writing either panel open, closed or moving to the Flash memory of the XIAO. Therewith current cover status remains on power up, unless the XIAO is disconnected while servo is moving. In this case the cover opens on the re-connection, as feels more save to me before moving fast into the dew shield.

3d parts are printed, cover is moving but wiring is still on a breadboard. Will assemble it next days and happily share some pictures.

Kind regards from Germany,
Alex

Control two covers from one computer?

Hi,
First, I'd like to thank you for this great project. It has been working flawlessly in my remote observatory for the past year!
I'm planning on adding a second camera with an attached telephoto lens piggyback on top of the scope I am currently using and would like to also equip it with one of your covers. Is it possible to control two covers using two instances of NINA from a single computer?
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Arnie (OregonAstronomer)

Issue with FreeCAD model

When I am trying to change globals in FreeCAD model to adjust to my OTA, I get issue with model recompile.

The issue seem to be with USB Connector hole sketch, which shows in a wrong plane:

Any ideas how to fix it?

FreeCAD 0.20.2 on Fedora 38