dokeeffe
commented
7 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
brandx99
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 :)