JoelyE95
03-08-2016, 01:53 PM
Hi All,
After a long time of researching forums and trying this and doing that to make EQDirect work for me. I figured I'd post this up which was a pretty simple way to go about it, but the events leading up to it definately mean that there is either a bug or omission in the code for EQMod which lead me down an expensive and tedious task of getting EQMod to talk directly with my AZ-EQ6.
First and foremost, I went through 2 other USB to Serial (PL2302 and FTDI) adapters (just the boards you see cheap to make the cable yourself) before finally biting the bullet and coughing up to buy the USB2EQ5 cable on Bintel.
When it came to the third and final try with this new cable, it still did not work. EQDIRCheck kept saying "Could Not Connect to EQ Mount". I researched more and more and could not find anyone who had posted a solution (other than saying they fixed it without saying how) that was freely available without having to sign up for a Yahoo account to go through the EQMod Yahoo Group and potentially find out.
I thought all was lost and that I would perhaps need to go about doing a clean install with the aussumption that there was a weird issue with drivers or the fact that I am on a 64-Bit machine (Windows 10 Pro) and that EQMod did not like that.
On a hunch, I thought I might do a clean install of ASCOM then a clean install of EQMod after the drivers were again cleanly installed for the USB2EQ5 cable.... BINGO!!!!
So, in my case. It turns out that if you already had EQMod installed before installing a serial host, EQMod just will not recognise it. You might not have to reinstall ASCOM, but I decided to at the same time anyway just in case.
Other things I discovered were that the FTDI chipset for the USB2EQ5 cable seems to keep the same COM Port number when it is plugged into the same port on the computer, with or without a hub plugged into that same port. The other PL2303 (Prolific) chipsets seem to want to change when you change between directly plugged in the computer to being plugged into a hub. Also, I have not yet bothered about going back to the other cables I made up. I'll just keep them in a box until something goes wrong with this one.
Hopefully this post will help someone else out there who has had the same problems as me, or even something similar. It gave me a lot of frustration at something so simple that should have more or less just worked. It seems to be one of the cases that is not documented anywhere. Perhaps the dark web?
Joel
After a long time of researching forums and trying this and doing that to make EQDirect work for me. I figured I'd post this up which was a pretty simple way to go about it, but the events leading up to it definately mean that there is either a bug or omission in the code for EQMod which lead me down an expensive and tedious task of getting EQMod to talk directly with my AZ-EQ6.
First and foremost, I went through 2 other USB to Serial (PL2302 and FTDI) adapters (just the boards you see cheap to make the cable yourself) before finally biting the bullet and coughing up to buy the USB2EQ5 cable on Bintel.
When it came to the third and final try with this new cable, it still did not work. EQDIRCheck kept saying "Could Not Connect to EQ Mount". I researched more and more and could not find anyone who had posted a solution (other than saying they fixed it without saying how) that was freely available without having to sign up for a Yahoo account to go through the EQMod Yahoo Group and potentially find out.
I thought all was lost and that I would perhaps need to go about doing a clean install with the aussumption that there was a weird issue with drivers or the fact that I am on a 64-Bit machine (Windows 10 Pro) and that EQMod did not like that.
On a hunch, I thought I might do a clean install of ASCOM then a clean install of EQMod after the drivers were again cleanly installed for the USB2EQ5 cable.... BINGO!!!!
So, in my case. It turns out that if you already had EQMod installed before installing a serial host, EQMod just will not recognise it. You might not have to reinstall ASCOM, but I decided to at the same time anyway just in case.
Other things I discovered were that the FTDI chipset for the USB2EQ5 cable seems to keep the same COM Port number when it is plugged into the same port on the computer, with or without a hub plugged into that same port. The other PL2303 (Prolific) chipsets seem to want to change when you change between directly plugged in the computer to being plugged into a hub. Also, I have not yet bothered about going back to the other cables I made up. I'll just keep them in a box until something goes wrong with this one.
Hopefully this post will help someone else out there who has had the same problems as me, or even something similar. It gave me a lot of frustration at something so simple that should have more or less just worked. It seems to be one of the cases that is not documented anywhere. Perhaps the dark web?
Joel