Author: Paweł T. Jochym jochy.nosp@m.m@wo.nosp@m.lf.if.nosp@m.j.ed.nosp@m.u.pl

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Do not use this driver unattended! It is ALPHA/BETA software! Always have your power switch ready! It is NOT SUITABLE for autonomous operation! You use this software ON YOUR OWN RISK! THERE ARE NO SLEW LIMITS IMPLEMENTED AT THIS STAGE! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is eqmod-style driver for the NexStar and other Celestron AUX-protocol mounts. At the moment it only works over Wi-Fi link to the NexStar-Evolution mount. It should also work over serial link to AUX port if someone writes the serial comm procedures. Since I do not have AUX-port adapter for my scope, I cannot write and test this part. I intend to implement the hand controller (HC) serial link mode communication - it is supposedly more reliable than the direct AUX port communication and requires only standard USB-RS232 adapter and a serial cable with RJ connector. Furthermore RS-232 transmission is probably more robust than AUX-port connection.

The driver is in the alpha/beta stage. It is functional and should work as intended but it is not complete. I am using it and will be happy to help any brave testers. I of course welcome any feedback/contribution.

What works:

N-star alignment (with INDI alignment module)
Basic tracking, slew, park/unpark
GPS simulation. If you have HC connected and you have active gps driver it can simulate Celestron GPS device and serve GPS data to HC. Works quite nicely on RaspberryPi with a GPS module. You can actually use it as a replacement for the Celestron GPS.

What does not work/is not implemented:

Joystick control
Slew limits
Serial link
HC interaction (tracking HC motor commands to function as joystick)
Probably many other things

Install

The driver is not included in the PPA distribution yet - due to its alpha/beta state. So to use it you need to compile it from the source yourself.

You can make a stand-alone compilation or build the debian packages for your system. It should be fairly easy. Let me know if something in the following guide is wrong or if you have problem with compiling the driver.

Get the source

You can get the source from the SVN repository of the system on sourceforge maintained by the INDI project (see the website of the project) or get it from the github mirror of the sourceforge repository maintained by the author of this driver. Both will do fine. The github repository lets you track the development of the driver more closely in the nse branch of the repository, since only master branch is uploaded back to the upstream SVN repository.

Make some working directory and change into it.
Get the source from the SVN or from github master branch - it takes a while the repo is 64MB in size. These should at least compile and are kept consistent - in the nse branch you may encounter WIP state with inconsistent state of the driver. From github you get it like this:

git clone https://github.com/jochym/indilib.git

Create build directory at the same level as indilib directory created above.

Compiling on any linux system

The compilation is simple. You will need indi libraries installed. The best way is to install libindi-dev package from the PPA. You may also want to have indi-gpsd and gpsd packages installed (not strictly required). If you cannot use the PPA you need to install libindi-dev from your distribution or compile the indi libraries yourself using instructions from the INDI website. I have not tested the backward compatibility but the driver should compile and work at least with the 1.1 version of the library. My recommendation: use PPA if you can. To compile the driver you will need also: cmake, cdbs, libindi-dev, libnova-dev, zlib1g-dev. Run following commands (you can select other install prefix):

cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local . ../indilib/3rdparty/indi-nexstarevo/
make

You can run make install optionally at the end if you like to have the driver properly installed.

Building debian/ubuntu packages

To build the debian package you will need the debian packaging tools: build-essential, devscripts, debhelper, fakeroot

Create package directory at the same level as indilib directory with the cloned source. Then execute:

cd package
ln -s ../indilib/cmake_modules .
cp -r ../indilib/debian/indi-nexstarevo debian
cp -r ../indilib/3rdparty/indi-nexstarevo/* .
fakeroot debian/rules binary
fakeroot debian/rules clean

this should produce two packages in the main build directory (above package), which you can install with sudo dpkg -i indi-nexstarevo_*.deb.