TOPIC: SkySafari Support for INDI

Hey all,

I mentioned in another thread that I was going to follow up with Simulation Curriculum to determine what would be needed for SkySafari to support INDI, other than users beating down their doors, they are looking at the mounts they support versus the ones that INDI supports as a blocker. To quote them:

I would switch to INDI if we that would allow us to totally remove our own scope drivers, but it doesn't seem to cover as many scope types as we currently do

The list of scopes they support is here:
www.skysafariastronomy.com/products/skyfi/index.ht

I am not sure what the gap is, but if that is closed, it will be easier to get them to support.

The simplest way to close that gap would be for them to donate some missing drivers.
Fat chance! I am a satisfied customer of S-C but I think there is very slim chance that they
will donate any code to the GPL project. The nexstarevolution driver could use some independent info - but I am not holding my breath...

1. SkySafari should not remove support for their mount drivers, it should remain as is. What I suggest is they add a new mount type "INDI Mount". Adding such support is not complicated and I can offer help in this matter to facilitate this process.
2. All mounts on the list are supported. I'm not exactly sure about ServoCAT & Lumincon Sky Vector. Paramount can only be controlled in INDI via TheSky6 (not direct connection). But the rest of the mounts are already supported under INDI.

You are of course right. This will be beneficial for both parties - I would *love* to have SkySafari control the indi server. It will be very useful.
And you can use it *together* with other indi clients/scripts etc.

I'm one of the SkySafari developers. We would like to add INDI support if it is not to difficult.

I don't understand how the UI works with INDI in a mobile app. Does INDI present a UI or do we continue to use our current UI and just make the appropriate calls to INDI? If the latter, what is the advantage of supporting INDI? It doesn't look like you support more mounts than we currently support with our native code.

It's both. You can provide INDI UI (INDI Control Panel) or you can just make calls to INDI. The advantage of supporting INDI is that many users are running their own setup on embedded devices (e.g. Raspberry PI) and so they would like to use SkySafari to control the telescope. Please contact me at mutlaqja AT ikarustech DOT com to discuss more details.

You can look at the source code of Remote Observatory for Android and IPARCOS Android client for INDI .

P.S. Info about current INDI clients are on page www.indilib.org/about/clients.html

For me as a user of indi-enabled programs and skysafari the main point would be ability to use both at the same time without disturbing the calibration and workings of any of the programs. This is really the main point. The applications have strengths and weaknesses. I would love to use S-S on my phone at the scope while not loosing control from the client running on my PC (I use linux, you will probably not support linux in the near future ...).
Regarding UI - Jasem should weight on this but I think it should be reasonably easy to expose indi properties in your UI without disrupting your design. You have different setup screens for different mounts already - this will be just another one.
There are at least two android clients for indi (remote observatory and ipparcos).

Jochym wrote: ...
There are at least two android clients for indi (remote observatory and ipparcos).

... and third INDI client for Android - KStars Lite .

And if I may put down my two cents as a paying and satisfied customer of SkySafari 5 Pro - *please* at least consider implementing this bridge. It will make your program much more useful for people like me - running the scope from the RPi and controlling it remotely from the PC. Right now it is only useful for playing and demonstrations. If I want to do anything more serious I need to drop it and change to INDI.
I would also vote for Linux support - but that is quite different story...

Jochym,
do you know about the SkySafari 5 for Android?

Sure. I am a user of this version. I have no OSX machines to run it on