Dear all

I am the happy owner of another flavor of "extended LX200" telescope driver, the Pulsar 2 ( www.geminitelescope.com/gemini-german-fork-mounts-goto-manuals/ ).
Currently, I tested several LX200 drivers already available in INDI, and I'm capable of driving the mount with minimal capabilities several limitations. Some glitches are however present (for example, end-of-slew is detected way too much early, as soon as the slew starts).
The firm owner and developer, Andras Dan, is very interested to implement a Linux capability for this device, and after all I think that this would simply require a tuning of one of the existing LX200 drivers. However, neither Andras nor me have any past experience with INDI development. So, before embarking in this challenge, I'd like to know if any one is willing to assist with this...

Cheers
Paolo

Hi Paolo, I'm the developer of the LX200 driver, did you try using indi_lx200_basic ?

Hi!
I tried, but I got the best results (still, approximately...) with the "LX200 classic"... Even the AstroPhysics does not work so bad. However, maybe you can check the LX 200 set used by the Pulsar here ("For programmer" at the bottom of the page):
www.geminitelescope.com/gemini-pulsar-do...m-firmware-database/

As you can see there are a lot of user setting (some of them, very useful) and a probably some specific commands. Do you think that you could tune a specific version?

Paolo

You'd need to implement a new library for the "extended" command set, and then subclass INDI::LX200Generic to add the extra functionality. If you need help in doing that, please let me know.

In fact, what scares me is that I never developed in the frame of INDI, so I have read docs etc but everything is just in theory. If you could provide a "template" for the new library (with one of the extended commands as an example) and for the subclass of the LX200Generic, that would be a great help. This way the framework would be set, and I would just fill what is missing (also leaning a lot, in the process...)...

It's fairly straight forward. You can follow the steps of Astrophysics driver as it also offers "Extended LX200 command set". So you'll see lx200apdriver.[c,h] and then there is lx200ap.[cpp,h] which is the actual INDI driver and is a subclass of LX200Generic. Since you're having problems with slew command finishing early, I'd recommend you'd completely override ReadScopeStatus() from LX200Generic and develop one for your driver since the one in LX200Generic is using isSlewComplete() functionand command is perhaps not implemented by your firmware.

So the LX200 AP driver is your template. Let me know if you run into issues.

Great, thanks! I'll start creating the files, then the best would probably be to upload the whole stuff to (the appropriate branch of?) the repository...? I'll get back in touch asking how to do that....

I recently came back to this issue and I think that I have now developed the essential skeleton for a new driver devoted to LX200 "Pulsar" flavor. Everything compiles well.
Now, I'd like to move forward with testing - but I don't know how to.
How can I have my new driver listed in the "telescope" selection of Ekos?

I'm assuming you're making your changes in libindi tree. Then you just need to edit drivers.xml in libindi to add the driver and make install. Next time you start KStars it should be there.

Thanks! I can see and start it now from ekos - very handy. I also see that my buggy driver needs some corrections (it fails when connecting and crashes).

Ok, this is the situation, and I feel a little stuck now...:
As I wrote before I am now able to load the driver from Ekos, see/change the options (debug, simulation, save/load config, port... etc). I try to run in "verbose" mode and to see messages on the client and/or the log file, but when I click on "connect" nothing happens. Not a single message (not even those that I added on porpose at the beginning of the "::Connect" method), just the small light turning yellow and staying like that "forever".

Now I feel that I could spend a lot of time (without any solid knowledge of the general framework) to dig out the bug, so I'm asking if you could help in the process. Once the driver is connecting and working, I can then improve it, add options etc.

An underlying problem: I started developing under 1.0.0, and now INDI is at 1.1... How to merge my branch to the new version?

Thank you for any help!

Paolo

can you post a link to the driver?