This is the easy part. If you have never written a Perl module, you can find some tutorials elsewhere [need reference]. Our Perl module will be called Astro::INDI and we can produce a skeleton quite simply. I’m going to be bit picky here and insert POD (plain-old documentation) as I do this. It’s a habit …

Boiler PlateRead More

This is a work in progress, and is really composed of my working notes more than anything else. The INDI project is still young enough that the focus has been on writing device drivers and implementing potentially useful features. The side effect is that you are “stuck” with using whatever clients are available. The FAQ …

INDI: Writing an INDI clientRead More

After a bit of work, I’ve been able to hack the Drupal G2Image module to allow inserting full-size images. This isn’t exactly what I want, but it is better than inserting thumbnails. The problem with thumbnails is they look like crap when scaled up. The problem with full-sized images is that they end up being …

G2Image HacksRead More

Well, after spending a lot of time remachining the bar on which I mount the cameras to give me better control over where they are mounted left-right, I concluded I didn’t have a balance problem to start with. The pier is not vertical so when the counterweight bar settled it appeared I was overweight on …

Unbalanced – Not!Read More

No, not me (well…), it’s my scope. I loaded everything onto my MI-250 as planned for next week and discovered I can’t get a good balance left-right (uhm, declination). It’s that 300mm f/4 lens on the Pentax 67. I had a clever idea that suffered the same fate as many of my clever ideas—it didn’t …

UnbalancedRead More

This post is coming after a long set of troubleshooting exercises along with what is hopefully a happy ending. The Canon-supplied software for computer control of the camera will only talk to one camera at a time. You can’t even launch two instances of it. Aaarrgh! Well, actually not that bad since I wasn’t planning …

Canon DSLR + ImagesPlusRead More

Well, I contacted the seller of the camera about my problems and he said he had a similar problem, also with his laptop, and the problem was the parallel port. The troubleshooting guide also mentions that as a warning and says some people have reported problems with IBM laptops. Of course, I have an IBM …

SAC 8-II Woes, Solution?Read More

I purchased a used SAC 8-II off astromart a few weeks ago after which it promptly sat in the box apart from a cursory examination. The intent was to use it as a light-weight autoguider. I quickly installed the software and "tested" it without being attached to anything. I was getting a signal out of …

SAC 8-II WoesRead More

I was having a problem on with using Gallery’s image block which requires loading PHP code . It would usually work just fine, but for some reason, the image was occasionally truncated. Since I have access to the backend, I could look at the raw file and knew it had uploaded just fine. Turns out …

Truncated (large) images in Gallery2 — not!Read More

It turns out that g2image can only insert thumbnails. There’s apparently a hack for the WordPress users and the ability to insert full images (and then they can use TinyMCE edit/scale them). I’ll have to keep checking to see when that’s available.