CPWI, SSAG, ASCOM and Sharpcap battle

[RavensNest]

I have recently switched over to the Starsense Autoguider (SSAG) for alignment and tracking. Works great and I got 3 minute subs last night with near perfect stars. This while running a 20+ year old Nexstar11 GPS on a wedge with hyperstar and ZWO 2600MC Pro. The battle becomes how to get ASCOM to allow Sharpcap access to the scope controls while using SSAG to allow for dithering and auto focusing. Looking for a simple solution as I am not a techno wiz. There is a YT video where someone connects CPWI through the focuser but not sure how all that could work. BTW, I have tried using PHD2 but it seems to blow up the camera controls after a few minutes. The SSAG has been flawless so far. Ideas/suggestions/solutions?

[admin]

Hi,

the usual approach with Celestron hardware like mount controls and focuser controls would be to set up SharpCap to talk to the CPWI ASCOM drivers, have CPWI running on the PC and then everything should work. Does the use of the SSAG somehow block SharpCap from accessing the CPWI ASCOM drivers for the telescope mount and focuser? (I haven't seen or used an SSAG, so not really sure how it works).

In respect of control of the guiding process for telescope movements/dithering, there was previously some speculation that this can be achieved by enabling 'PHD Mode' in the SSAG settings, which may enable a mode where the CPWI software pretends to be PHD2 guiding from the point of view of imaging applications like SharpCap. There was a discussion here (viewtopic.php?t=6911) but no conclusion on whether it actually worked or not. If it does work that way then turning on 'PHD Mode', telling SharpCap to use PHD2 as a guiding application and *NOT RUNNING PHD2* might be the trick - CPWI would be pretending to be PHD2, SharpCap would end up talking to CPWI thinking it was talking to PHD2 and it might just all work...

cheers,

Robin

[carlomuccini]

I have a Celestron CGX-L that I use exclusively with the USB cable and the Celestron CPWI Software and Skymap Pro with several telescopes.
Using the Celestron RASA 8" I installed the Celestron electric focuser always controlled by CPWI.
Sharpcap and Skymap are connected by CPWI; every time without problems.