Quote:
Originally Posted by g__day
Has anyone found a fully automated way to get date / time electronically from a PC into Celestrons hand controller without a GPS? Nexstar can give (actually sell you an expensive and practically useless) PC based version of your handcontroller on your screen, but you still have to manually press alot of buttons rather than execute a few simple calls to system time and system date and/or execute a read of a stored location to set itself up. What a whoopsie!
/end_rant!
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I had similar problems a while back. I did come across a custom script. Will see if I can dig it up. Many software packages may now support this feature.
In short it is possible as the Nexstar protocol support setting the date, time and location information for the serial interface.
Refer to the following link for more info:
http://www.celestron.com/c2/images/f...arcommprot.pdf
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Time/Location Commands (Hand Control)
The following commands set the time and location in the hand control.
The format of the location commands is: ABCDEFGH, where:
A is the number of degrees of latitude.
B is the number of minutes of latitude.
C is the number of seconds of latitude.
D is 0 for north and 1 for south.
E is the number of degrees of longitude.
F is the number of minutes of longitude.
G is the number of seconds of longitude.
H is 0 for east and 1 for west.
For example, to set the location to 118°20’17” W, 33°50’41” N, you would send (note that latitude is before longitude):
“W” & chr(33) & chr(50) & chr(41) & chr(0) & chr(118) & chr(20) & chr(17) & chr(1)
The format of the time commands is: QRSTUVWX, where:
Q is the hour (24 hour clock).
R is the minutes.
S is the seconds.
T is the month.
U is the day.
V is the year (century assumed as 20).
W is the offset from GMT for the time zone. Note: if zone is negative, use 256-zone.
X is 1 to enable Daylight Savings and 0 for Standard Time.
For example, to set the time to 3:26:00PM on April 6, 2005 in the Eastern time zone (-5 UTC: 256-5 = 251) you would send:
“H” & chr(15) & chr(26) & chr(0) & chr(4) & chr(6) & chr(5) & chr(251) & chr(1)
Note: All values are sent in binary format, not ASCII.
Note: The Get commands do not retrieve the time and location from the GPS unit (if one is present). The time and location are retrieved from the hand control. You must first enter the View Time/Site menu to update the hand control time if you want the time from the GPS or, use the GPS Commands in the next section.