|
Hello Nick & everyone,
First up - Happy New year fellow imagers from down under ! Hope everyone had a fun time and there are not too many sore heads ?
I have been working on modifications to allow you to perform your monster focuser moves Nick. I'm happy that everything is completed and working well. Essentially I have made modifications in three areas as follows :
1. Modified the SharpSky driver to deal with a maximum focuser range of 150000 steps and a maximum single jump of 150000 steps
2. Modified the PIC firmware to deal with the extra step range by internally increasing the microprocessor dynamic range 16->24bits and also the USB message sizes.
3. Modified the SharpSky client to deal with the extra step range
The driver also has a new function which allows you to pre-set the displayed absolute position value to anything you like. So say you can zero the displayed position at some arbitrary physical position. The SharpSky client has a 'setup' tab added allowing the Properties dialogue pane to be opened at any time.
Ok, so here is what you need to do :
1. Download the bootloader PC application from the web-site and also the revised firmware (SharpSky.hex). The bootloader section is found at the very end of the web-site and there are instructions on how to re-flash the microprocessor over the USB. It's quite straight forward and only takes a few seconds to actually flash.
2. Uninstall the current driver being careful to make sure all ASCOM applications are shut down !
3. Download and install the new PC driver V3.11 from the web-site
4. Download the new SharpSky client if you use it V1.13
If you use the new driver with the old firmware things will still work just fine but the driver will warn you that you are using an out of date firmware version and then automatically reduce the maximum step value from 150000 to 30000. It will not warn you again once the reduction has been made.
I hope you get on ok with the changes, please let me know how it goes.
Cheers & clear skies,
Dave
|