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nforrester / NexPlane

Track airplanes and satellites using a Celestron NexStar telescope
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Integration with skyportal WIFI dongle #5

Open iflyforfood opened 1 month ago

iflyforfood commented 1 month ago

Hi was just wondering how easy/difficult it would be to make this work with the skyportal wifi dongle? Is there a way to point the nexplane script to output guidance commands to the wifi dongle instead of usb? Could it be as simple as pointing to the dongles ip address? I've only been able to have it work in OOTL mode so far while I wait for a USB converter

nforrester commented 1 month ago

It won't be just a config change to point at the dongle's IP, because the dongle won't speak the same protocol as the NexPlane RPC server. It might be possible to make it work with some code changes, but I don't have a dongle to test with. This thread on Cloudy Nights suggests that we might be able to send commands directly to UDP port 2000 on the dongle. If you're game for some experimentation I could try to push a branch with such a feature so you can test it.

How familiar are you with Python and networking?

On Mon, Sep 30, 2024, 09:33 iflyforfood @.***> wrote:

Hi was just wondering how easy/difficult it would be to make this work with the skyportal wifi dongle? Is there a way to point the nexplane script to output guidance commands to the wifi dongle instead of usb? Could it be as simple as pointing to the dongles ip address? I've only been able to have it work in OOTL mode so far while I wait for a USB converter

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iflyforfood commented 1 month ago

I'm down, I have some time off this week.

The most I've done with python is the cliche "hello world" test. That's the extent of my coding ability. That being said, I've spent many a dozen hours, probably hundreds, copy pasting code into terminals and what not, be it on Linux, Rpis, SSH etc. I know just enough to get myself out of trouble for the most part, especially more so nowadays with chat-gpt holding my hand.

Anyways, my goal is to make it ultra-portable, as I live very close to a huge airport and there's a few different spots from my location that I can move the scope around, plus it would be nice to be able to control the scope while it's outside as I control it from the inside in air-conditioned comfort, without having to resort to a rats nest of wires between a Rpi or laptop etc