Hi Chris,
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Originally Posted by chrisshillito
EQMOD aims to be a free and open project and we will never charge for EQMOD nor request donations. The consequence of this is that developers bear the cost of development and naturally support for new equipment will only occur if a current developer buys that equipment or new developers join the project.
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I'm another happy user of EQMOD and very grateful for your efforts!
Quote:
If the EQ8 is not EQASCOM compatible then I would urge all those who are considering this mount to question Skywatcher, and their distributors as to why, what has changed and what, if anything they plan to do about it.
If Skywatcher are made aware that their customer base demands it then they may be more willing to volunteer technical information to the EQMOD development team that would ease any development effort. Failing that to reverse engineer an EQ8 a developer would require access to a motor controller board, motors+encoders and synscan - they wouldn't need a gift of an entire mount.
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Skywatcher appears to have released some source code and an API for their mounts back in 2011 (though it seems a little redundant given the existence of EQMOD):
http://www.skywatcher.com/swtinc/news.php?id=21
However, they do seem to be willing to share technical information about their mounts. Their website encourages feedback on the Facebook page, so perhaps that would be a good place to provide feedback about wanting access to technical specifications?
https://www.facebook.com/SkyWatcherTelescope
At a minimum, I'd imagine that the new addition of absolute encoders would require some tweaking to the EQMOD code...