Hi everybody,

I am in the core team behind Lin_guider and I was wondering why there is no support for lin_guider dithering from Ekos.
On the other hand Lin_guider provides a tool that can be used as a dithering agent and I was wondering would it be possible to call it somehow from Ekos between exposures. Anyway it would be nice to have a lin_guider support or at least a way to call lin_guider's tool between the exposures. Is there a way to do so?

Thanks
Rumen

When lin_guider was first imported in Ekos, it did not support dithering. Since then, the code bases diverged and I added dithering support to Ekos later on. So Ekos supports dithering, but not from lin_guider tool.

By the way we are preparing the release of lin_guider 4.0 with plenty of new features and guiding algorithms.
So it would be nice there is such feature. It would be nice to add support in Ekos for "dithering agents" which should be called blindly and just wait for the exit code. The agent will take care of the dithering procedure and report success or failure. This way Ekos will easily support all possible guider software. and there will be no reason to explicitly add support for different guiders. Would you accept such a solution? I think its simple and elegant...

I am not sure I understand. Does Ekos suport dithering for mainstream lin_guider?

Ekos guiding module is based on lin_guider but the code is a bit different now, so it's not easy to incorporate changes from upstream lin_guider back into Ekos. Ekos uses its own dithering mechanism now. KStars is open source, if you can hack the code to make the guiding code in Ekos synced with lin_guider 4.0, that would be great!

Sorry, can you point me to the official Ekos repo and I will see what I can do...

Here is the GIT repo . Go to KStars --> Ekos directory.

Great thank you!
I will see what I can do as I am quite busy at the moment, never used Ekos before I used only command line scripts that i created adhoc for imaging but I decided to go GUI and I was surprised that Ekos does not talk to lin_guider ...

What do you prefer native support or via dithering agent?

Why is a dithering agent required? The one in Ekos works just fine.

The idea is to have a script/executable or whatever program that can talk to a specific guiding software lin_guider, AstroGuider etc...
Ekos does not need to know how how to talk to them, it will just know what agent to execute. You will have a textbox in Ekos GUI that provides a path to the executable and the options to be provided to the executabe in order to connect to the guider software and to perform the dithering. Ekos will only look for the exit code of the agent. for example 0 -> success, 1 -> can not connect to guider, 2 -> guiding is not started etc...

So the basic idea is: for dithering Ekos will call configured agent (provided by third party or part of Ekos) it will perform dithering and report the result to Ekos. This way Ekos will be able to dither virtually all guiders without hacking in to the Ekos code caring about protocol and communication channels required by the specific guider software. So one can write his own agent or use the one provided by the software maker. A lot like the Indi drivers...

Did I explain the idea?

It's clear, but why limit it to dither only? Ekos can be configured to use an external lin_guider for guiding + dithering. I recently added support to PHD2 the same way. But someone needs to add support and my TODO list is huge as it is now. Feel free to submit a patch to implement this.

That is bad... Mine is huge too.. I was secretly hoping that somebody will be willing to take the initiative And it seems that the ASI driver for indi needs some attention and I may be able to help and I have personal interest to make it work...