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Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

DYI Focuser with high resolution and ekos (nor the kstars indi interface) issues

  • Posts: 29
  • Thank you received: 5
Hi,
I have built a dit focuser using a nema17 + planetary gear with a ratio of 29, having roughly a 0.00041 mm per step. I'm using the moonlight driver. With this setup, i reach focus at ~ 70500 steps (~ 20.11mm focuser outward). I found that It's impossible to use such a number in ekos/kstars as it has an hard limit on 65535 steps and an interface limit to 60000 (strange number tho...).
I'm not proficient enough to create a pyindi interface and test if the problem is in the driver itself or in the kstars/ekos interface. What do you suggest? At the moment i'm moving to 50000, then set position as 0 and then move again, but this is not a good solution imho.
FYI:
Kstars 3.0.0 and indi 1.7.6

Thanks
Luca
5 years 2 months ago #33006

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Not sure you are correct, I use a focuser with 125,000 steps to go from fully in to fully out on my tube, and that works with no issues...although am using a different driver...but works fine in Ekos.. :)
The following user(s) said Thank You: Luca Gervasi
5 years 2 months ago #33007

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Hi and thank you for your answer.
Your reply suggested that it has nothing to do with ekos/kstars so i took the code from github and...it seems that the absolute max position is hardcoded to 60000:
bool MoonLite::initProperties()
{
    INDI::Focuser::initProperties();
   /* removed some lines */
    FocusAbsPosN[0].min   = 0.;
    FocusAbsPosN[0].max   = 60000.;
    FocusAbsPosN[0].value = 0;
    FocusAbsPosN[0].step  = 1000;
 
    setDefaultPollingPeriod(500);
    addDebugControl();
 
    return true;

So it seems it was a bad idea leverage moonlight's driver for my diy focuser :(

Modifying the max travel in the indi interface doesn't seems to solve the problem.
5 years 2 months ago #33009

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What happens when you update the max travel? it still doesn't accept larger values? I'll update it to 100,000 by default, but it shouldn't matter with max travel property that I added for this very purpose.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Luca Gervasi
5 years 2 months ago #33011

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Thanks knro for your answer.

Setting this value manually to 100.000 seems to be inconsistent as i'm unable to input values bigger than 60000 in kstars's focus panel and I'm unable to set values bigger than 60000 on the preset tab. Plus (and this is strange) focusing module seems to ignore this limit when i hit "focus in" button (which does a steps +=100) and goes on to 65535 steps.

I edited the xml file and can confirm that the value has been saved:
    <newNumberVector device="MoonLite" name="FOCUS_MAX">
        <oneNumber name="FOCUS_MAX_VALUE">
1000000
        </oneNumber>
    </newNumberVector>

But I see that what seems to be related to this value is commented out in the code (moonlite.cpp, lines 100-102 @ master).
Is there any other common interface (and arduino code) that should be used in DIY projects instead of the moonlight's one ?

Thanks Again.

Luca
Last edit: 5 years 2 months ago by Luca Gervasi.
5 years 2 months ago #33012

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Hello, I built a focuser as shown in this post indilib.org/forum/focusers-filter-wheels...-piface.html?start=0 and I have a similar problem, but I use indi_rpifocus.
Ekos gives me maximum availability of 40000 steps but I would need at least triple this value. Does anyone know how I can increase the maximum step limit?
3 years 5 months ago #60429

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You need to contact the driver developer to fix this, it's not an Ekos issue.
The following user(s) said Thank You: luigi
3 years 5 months ago #60439

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You need to edit line 32 of piface_focuser.cpp file (#define MAX_STEPS 20000) and set your preferred value.
Please note that I do not update this driver anymore because original piface addon is not available anymore.
The following user(s) said Thank You: luigi
3 years 5 months ago #60445

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Yes! is working now thank you guys

Inviato dal mio SM-M307FN utilizzando Tapatalk
3 years 5 months ago #60769

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