From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: July 7, 2007 6:33:54 PM MDT
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] guiding with Astro IIDC
Phil;
On 7-Jul-07, at 5:42 PM, Phil Houston wrote:
The mount Is a standard Questar mount controlled by a Powerguide II controller. This controller has only four buttons to control direction. There is no programable speed control. The GPUSB is connected directly to the controller's push button circuitry through a matching cable and activates the RA and Dec. motors as if the buttons were pushed. I do not know the speed but this drive is for position correction not for slewing.
That isn't how a real ST4 guiding port works though. It sound more like how I hacked my old EQ3/2 mount's hand controller and added an RJ12 port to it so I could flip the left right / up down buttons to move the scope.
I must retract an earlier statement about the manual up, down, left, right buttons working. They do not. When the Mount Control window opens, the red light on the GPUSB box turns green until the window is canceled.
The Light changes color from red to green means that Astro IIDC is talking to the GPUSB - that's all it means. If it fails because of soem problem with the GPUSB, you should also see message sin the Console.log window too.
If the up down left right buttons do not work - then it will never calibrate or guide.
I checked the Specs for the Powerguide II controller
http://www.company7.com/questar/products/qpowerguideII.html
and it does not mention "ST-4" compatibility at all. No search on Google mentioned ST4 with Questar or Powerguide II or guiding found a single mention of anyone using it like that.
So I'm not sure what it's doing.
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
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