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dokeeffe / ip-focuser

Motorised telescope focuser with an HTTP interface
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Question on Indi Driver #1

Open feilimb opened 8 years ago

feilimb commented 8 years ago

Hi Derek,

Sorry this is not an issue as such, but more of a bunch of questions!

I came across this great project via the Indilib forums when I was searching on DIY focusers. I had been intending to have crack at building a focuser running from an ESP8266 (WiFi) module over IP and there was a lot of parallels with your project here.

I actually have successfully ported your code into an ESP8266 based solution, my motor was also different (it is a cheap as chips motor / driver board => ULN2003APG board and 28BYJ-48 stepper motor) so I had to port to motor control code also.

One or two questions.... Would it be possible to provide a pre-built copy of the indi driver? I have not managed to install the whole toolchain for driver compilation and if it is not too much trouble this would be very handy for testing outside of a terminal / curl.

The Arduino library I found for my stepper motor has a 'setStepDuration' API which is basically a 'setSpeed' method. In my case, the lower the number the 'faster' the stepping => eg. setStepDuration(1) is ten times faster than setStepDuration(10). Do you think this matters in terms of how the firmware communicates with the driver (eg. bigger number is expected to be greater speed) - if it does matter I guess I can somehow translate the speeds to match according to an expected speed range?

Last question! When putting this to use (although I have not figured out how to mount the motor on my C8 yet) would you typically get the focus roughly correct manually before connecting the driver to Ekos?

Kind regards, Féilim

PS I happen to be based in Cork also - in the city :)

dokeeffe commented 8 years ago

Hi Feilim,

I'm delighted that this project was some use to someone :-)

To answer your questions 1) Pre built binary. I'm not sure how to do this. I know the build/install process places some binary file somewhere and also an xml file that indi uses. I'm not sure what else it places when the build process runs. Sorry I'm not an expert with this sort of build system (cmake). Actually its not difficult to built it. You just need to run the build.sh script (as root). Or have a look at the script and do it manually line by line. You need to install some packages to build indi drivers. Here is what you need as far as I know sudo apt-get install libnova-dev libcfitsio3-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev zlib1g-dev libgsl0-dev build-essential cmake git libjpeg-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev I copy pasted above from the README in https://github.com/indilib/indi

2) I'm not sure.. Actually I think the driver does not send a request setting the speed and it defaults to max speed? I would say test it (manually) and see what happens.

3) Mounting the motor: I've been through 2 iterations of mounting :-) The first one was spring loaded with a belt and 2 toothed gears. This way I could manually focus by hand by pulling the motor to the side and slackening the belt. However I have changed this recently so that the motor is directly connected to the knob. This is better than the belt that sometimes slipped. However its now difficult to move it manually unless I remove the entire focuser. It makes it difficult to use the scope visually but this is ok for me currently.

BTW I'm also living in Cork city :-) Derek

feilimb commented 8 years ago

Many thanks for the feedback, I will have a go at building the driver and installing dependencies when I get a chance.

I loaded up the focuser simulator in Ekos today and it looks like the speed is just a number that can be set manually rather than something which is changed automatically during the auto focus routine.

Thanks for the tips on mounting the motor, I hadn't considered the conflict with manual focus if the motor goes straight onto the focus knob. I may try a homemade bracket and some Technic Lego gears as a first attempt..

Clear skies, Féilim

brandx99 commented 6 years ago

Very interesting project! Do you think the controller could be connected(Ethernet) to the Stellarmate gadget? I would like focus remotely with Ekos from my PC using Stellarmate.

dokeeffe commented 6 years ago

Yes, if Sterrarmate is on the same network then it should work fine. However you will have to build this indi driver for stellarmate. I'm sure thats possible as its just a raspberry pi, as long as you can log into it and build this code it should all work fine. You might need to ask on the INDI forums or ask Jasem about building custom drivers for Stellarmate