After a long incubation period, I’ve finally moved the test web site over. It meant throwing away a lot of stuff I had custom written in PHP to run the web site, but the move was long overdue as trying to keep the information up-to-date was conflicting with having to mess with code on the …

astrofoto.org has a new lookRead More

The messages are XML, but the data is in a stream consisting of a sequence of messages. Each message can be treated independently and is self-contained. It is up to the client to organize the messages based on hints contained in the messages themselves (as provided by the device driver). This means that the first …

Basic I/O with the INDI ServerRead More

Our second method is connect. Yes, that name is overused, but it describes exactly what we are doing even if we also have to use the built-in “connect” method that is part of the TCP/IP functions in Perl (and the underlying C library). Ours will be part of the Astro::INDI object we are creating, so …

Connecting to the ServerRead More

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