I've been making some updates to the Astrophysics lx200ap driver and wanted to give a status report.
Website
I've added docuemntation for the Astrophysics driver here:
Astrophysics Documentation
. I would appreciate feedback.
Driver Development
With help from Jasem and users we've started to evolve the Astrophysics driver towards a more usable driver. The existing
lx200ap driver works well and I've been imaging with it for the last 9 months. But it shows it age in ways like requiring the user to choose a COLD or WARM initialization. When I investigated this I discovered for legacy firmware versions there just wasn't a good way to handle this. Talking with Astro-Physics I determined to be able to implement the features we wanted we would need to have a driver that required the 'V' level of the firmware. This is the same level that Astro-Physics requires for the APCC control software.
In order to maintain compatibility for existing users with older firmwares we decided to split the driver into
lx200ap for legacy use and
lx200ap_experimental for a actively developed driver requiring the 'V' firmware level. If there are problems discovered with the
lx200ap driver we will of course look into them. But most of my development time with be on the newer driver.
The immediate benefits of the newer driver are that you can now have the driver initialize the mount from the last parked position and avoid having to be involved in the initialization process - basically COLD and WARM initialization are now gone. There are also presets for setting the parking position to one of the 4 defined by Astro-Physics (PARK1/PARK2/PARK3/PARK4).
I am looking into adding the "Meridian Delay" functionality that lets you basically shift where a meridian flip occurs. Why would you want this? It lets you start imaging from a counter weight up position if your scope allows it and avoid a meridian flip. It has to be used to EXTREME caution obviously!
The
lx200ap_experimental driver should land on github sometime in the next week and I'd love to get feedback from anyone who wants to test it. As it is a new driver I would caution anyone using it to be careful and I'd be near the mount when doing slews and parking until we get some more testing in place. I've used it for imaging the past week and so far no surprises!