I'm having some problems with the ubuntu repository and maybe I hadn't tried the latest version of the drive: now everything seems to work, even if I notice some discrepancies in the "Pause at home" function.

@Corrado,

The last version should show up 1.19 in the connection tab.

Considering discrepancies between Indi and SmartWebServer I know there are still some and plan to fix them but therefore I need to identify one by one and there is where people can help.

I did set-up a repository where issues could be posted in a traceable way

github.com/azwing/OnStep_Issues/tree/main

I use Skywatcher Az-gti mount and I want to use OnSterX in pair with it but only as a focuser and rotator device.
How can I do this? Because I didn't find lx200 or onstep in the lists of focusers ot aux devices/

Hi,

to use the focuser and rotator there is no other way than lauching the lx200_OnStep driver
(under tools > devices > device manager > telescope > LX200 OnStep)
The driver must connect to the telescope (OnStep Firmware) before Ekos can see the Focuser / Rotator.

I don't know if many people use OnStep Hardware just for Focuser or Rotator but if it is the case it would be nice to have a dedicated driver for that usage.
What do other think about?

Would be nice to have separate driver for focuser/rotator.

That might not be a bad idea, as in almost all case it'd be able to share code.

We'd need to copy it and change the base class to probably INDI::Device and we could keep the Interfaces for the others which load as is, if we wanted something in parallel and quick and dirty, or we could see about moving from INDI::Telescope to INDI::TelescopeInterface and we could load it as needed, similar to the rotators and other things which are detected on connection.

After looking a bit, Actually scratch that, there's no telescopeinterface. Probably the only project that might consider it is OnStepX (heh). More fun with flexible open source software!

James,

yes I agree and even we could make it a bit differently.
Splitting the driver code in files specific to rotator, focuser and telescope and just include things as needed.
So we would end up with three main files located something like

indi/drivers/focuser OnStep_Focuser.cpp and .h
indi/drivers/rotator OnStep_rotator.cpp and .h
indi/drivers/telescope OnStep_Telescope and .h

but needs to be tought out carefully since it would also be a complete rewrite of the code to make things more modular

Does it sound reasonable?

Hello Alain,

I am quite new to this topic and am very interested in contributing to the onstep driver and to onstepx. As my setup is using two focuser I would like to improve the second focuser feature in the driver. Right now the driver can be selected with a custom switch that is not used by any indi client application. To me this looks like a workaround to avoid adding multiple focusers to the driver.
Do you know if it is possible to add multiple focuser tabs to the driver, so it can be selected by client applications like Ekos etc.?
I am not quite sure if this is possible or if adding two devices of the same kind to one driver is not provided by the indi library.

regards
Alex

Hi Alexander,

honestly I am not really interested in adding support for multiple focusers into the driver and this for two reasons:
- When I first tried to implement the second focuser it was a nightmare with Ekos
- I prefer the idea to have a dedicated driver for additional focusers (less complexity)
But of course if you would like to work on this topic free to you, that(s the purpose of open source

If you intend to start this job, it would be good advice to read Indi doc and see is multiple instances of "FI" (Focuser Interface) are possible and recognized by Ekos. I made so many times the error to believe it works but discovered afterwards it is not working with Ekos ...

Bon courage

Has anybody started working on seperate driver for focuser/rotator?

As far as I know, there is only one project that has forked from OnStep and reached a high level of usability, it is "TeenAstro".
Maybe some other people did something in this way but I never heard about.