Meade speed control

[mike shuter]

Just managed to connect my Meade LX200 ACF mount to SharpCap & found that the movement rate in the scope control makes no difference to the scope speed. The slew rate can only be changed with the Meade handset.
Is this the norm or am I missing something?

Regards,

Mike.

[admin]

Hi Mike,

there are a number of different Meade mount ASCOM drivers, and some of them don't support the 'MoveAxis' command at all (SharpCap uses that command for the direction buttons). SharpCap has it's own workaround that sends direct meade commands to the mount, and it sounds like that is activated on your system and the movement commands are working but the speed commands are not.

Unfortunately I don't have a Meade mount myself to test with, so this got developed based on feedback and testing by another Meade user some time ago. It sounds like the commands that worked with their system to set the movement rate don't work with your system, so you get a fixed rate.

Inspecting the code, SharpCap is sending ':EKn' commands to set the speed, where n is 1 to 9. I believe this is supposed to have the same effect as pressing the number keys on the hand controller to set the speeds, but as I say, no direct Meade experience to back this up.

It may be worth trying alternative Meade ASCOM drivers to see if you can find one that actually implements MoveAxis itself - SharpCap will try using the ASCOM driver for this function first and only fall back on its own workaround if the ASCOM driver doesn't implement MoveAxis or if it gets an error when trying to use it. I know that there seem to be a variety of both official and unofficial Meade ASCOM drivers out there...

cheers,

Robin

[mike shuter]

Thank you Robin for your prompt reply, seems like Meade don't want to join the general astro society. Ascoms support LX200 GPS but not LX200ACF.
I'm hoping SharpCap dithering will be effective with my mount whilst trying out live stacking.

Regards,

Mike.

[admin]

Hi Mike,

SharpCap's 'dither only' dithering option uses the pulse guiding commands on ASCOM rather than the move axis ones. Those are more commonly used and simpler, so hopefully they will be correctly implemented in the ASCOM driver.

cheers,

Robin

[mike shuter]

Robin, as SharpCap connects to my scope then hopefully the dithering will work - only time & a dark clear sky will tell.

Kind regards,

Mike.