Pete,

You touched on another interesting point.
At the risk of going OT here, while you are controlling your mount “remotely from your house”, as you say, HOW do you guarantee that your USB/Serial port commands don’t crash the telescope into the pier? Do you only observe toward the west, post meridian flip?

Until someone solves that, with a really nifty “collision avoidance” robotic feature in the controller, or associated planetarium program, I worry about using the control ports remotely.

Joe

From: Pete Su
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 9:49 AM
To: ap-gto@...
Subject: Re: [ap-gto] Re: Why AP mount don't have a USB port?

I think people get overly enamored of "modular" solutions. Often these
things just introduce complexity that no one wants to support use
cases that only a few people care about. We are probably better served
to have the control box on the mount use an interface that is widely
adopted and/or easy to support.

Personally I like the idea of network control. Unless I'm actually
looking through the telescope what I want to do is sit in the house
and keep and eye on things remotely. Having the thing be on my local
network at home is by far the easiest way to implement this.

Pete


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