TheSky6 through ASCOM Hub

[rogerg (Roger)]

Last night one of the many things I was playing around with while doing astronomy was using the ASCOM hub, the one that comes with it - POTH I think it's called?

I found that when I connected TheSky6 through POTH it became much more slow and unresponsive. It seemed much more susceptible to other processes happening on the PC, like CCDSoft downloading an image would completely hang TheSky6 until the download was finished (not much fun for 3 second continuous focus exposures). And moving via the motion controls was frustrating to say the least.

Anyone experience this? have solutions? Does something like MaxPoint perform more efficiently as a ASCOM Hub?

Also..

I had both PolarAlignMax and TheSky6 connected to the ASCOM hub. I found with this configuration I was getting strange behaviour with regard to plate solve's. A plate solve would work fine when PolarAlignMax was connected to the scope directly, but connected through the hub it couldn't get the plate solve right, it was always looking a little in the wrong place, like 40 arc-sec away or something, and missing the plate solve. Yet the scope definitely knew where it was correctly, as did TheSky6.

Very confusing stuff

Any comments anyone in the know?

I have never used an ASCOM hub before, it only became a requirement when I wanted to use TheSky6 for sync'ing on stars that PolarAlignMax was telling me to sync on.

Thanks,
Roger.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Roger,

All the fun I am having with Dan Bisque at the moment over the SKy6's incomplete support of ASCOM! I presume you are using TeleAPI.dll to invoke POTH which in turn invokes MaxPoint which finally invokes your LX200?

I haven't found TeleAPI or POTH slow (I'm on a dual core Conroe2 PC wiht a Gigabtye of RAM running WinXP and a Geforce 6600 video card) - what's your PC configuration and does it have enough RAM?

Meanwhile I'm dirty because Dan promised me in writing I could do nudges - well I can't do pulsed ones. When I asked why he said the ASCOM driver doesn't implement it - check with the developer - Bob Denny. Bob writes back Dan never revealed the functionality - I flick this back to Dan who responds oh just use the default driver - after explicitly promising my gear will work on the specific ASCOM drivers I informed him I wanted to use - much frustration.

A hub should be a basic straight through pipe with little overhead. Run windows task manager - click on performance to see if anything is maxed out. If it isn't a lack of RAM problem or a CPU at 100% utilisation it could be something as dumb as a bad FIFO buffer set-up.

I suggest also asking around on the Yahoo ASCOM - are you a member?

[rogerg (Roger)]

The PC is struggling a little, but I am not completely sure it's the result of hardware, rather a software fault. It's a 2.4gHz P4, 500mb ram. I'm considering upping the RAM to 1.5gig just in case it helps.

I watch task manager a lot, becuase data transmission via the LPT port consumes 100% CPU when active that I need to be wary of it. Having TheSky connected via ASCOM rather than it's other LX200 driver (propriatory I presume - to TheSky), definitely consumes significant CPU, but does not max it out at 100% constantly like it's in an infinate loop or anything.

I guess something I haven't tried doing is connecting TheSky to the scope using ASCOM and not the Hub. I'll have to try that.

I am actually a member of that ASCOM group but completely forgot about it, thanks for the reminder, I might re-visit the site when I have done some more testing.

Good to know it isn't slow on someone else's machine (although the spec's are a little superior to mine )

I am using the TeleAPI.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Not that much superior - and I'm running VNC which is a network hog. Windows loves lots of RAM so 1.5 GB is probably an excellent move.

More experimentation - reducing the dependency chain is probably needed to determine exactly what is causing the slow down. Its likely bad / sloppy code around the simplest thing - like a serial or I/O parallel port that is tying excessive resources up for no good reason.

I must admit I went a dual core solution (CPU was $200) just to give Windows and its sloppy drivers a bit more of a fighting chance!