SharpCap Forums

Hello,
I have:
Meade LX90 8" ACF SCT with Audiostar
Using (almost the) latest ASCOM
cjdskunkworks "generic" Meade ASCOM driver
Latest Sharpcap 64 bit

Sharpcap can connect to the mount, but slew bottoms work erratically. Sometimes clicking on an arrow doesn't move the mount at all. Sometimes it causes the mount to move, and then keeps on moving. I have to either click "stop" or click the button again.
"Park" feature sorta works - it starts going towards the park position, pauses, starts going again, pauses, etc. It takes about 3 movements before reaching the park position. Then the mount handset reports it is ok to turn off, but sharpcap complains that "mount failed to park within 90 seconds".

Should I be using a different driver?
BTW, I also have Stellarium connected via ASCOM at the same time, and it does correctly report the mount's position and correctly does goto.

Hi,

if you check your SharpCap log, you may see a line containing this text when you connect to the mount
That indicates that SharpCap is trying to work around the fact that previous Meade drivers did not support the 'MoveAxis' command needed to make the arrow keys work. Whether that happens or not depends on the name of the driver, so I'm not sure if it is happening for you or not.

Since the cjd driver is open source, I was able to check the code and I can see that it does have some support for MoveAxis, but it doesn't look as though it is fully compliant with the ASCOM standard - it accepts movement rates of 0,1,2,3 and 4, but should accept rates in degrees per second. Mind you, what is there might work, just it would display the wrong speeds in SharpCap.

Let me know whether you see the log entry above - if you are then I will try to change the code to de-activate SharpCap's MoveAxis workaround for the CJD driver so that you can test out using the actual code in the driver.

On the subject of Parking, SharpCap just asks the mount to park and the details are up to the ASCOM driver. SharpCap then expects the mount to report that it is parked and that it is not slewing any more within 90s. Let me know roughly how long your mount is taking and I can extend this threshold.

thanks,

Robin