Hi INDI,

I am author of a similar package, called RTS2(.org). I know about INDI when I started RTS2, but discareded it as at the time it does not provide reasonable support for CCDs.

I see that's now at least partially done - CCD support is there. I still lack some of the features I missed in INDI, which lead me to development of the RTS2, particularly:

- support for weather blocking
- support for a single device operation - blocking (camera is exposing and signal the observatory to block the telescope,..)
- support for multichannel CCD

etc. On opposite, it seems to attract wide enough community, wider than RTS2.

To make it short, before I will go into details - the question is: do you know about any other scheduler, which works on top of INDI? For me, the current INDI only allows device control, which is the first step towards autonomous observatory operations.

To say that, I am considering porting RTS2 driver layer to INDI, and develop INDI scheduler/autonomous observatory manager, which will work with what we have. For that, I will also need to port the existing RTSě drivers.

This will not be trivial. I have some possibilities for funding which I will exploit, but if you know about some, please let me know - if unfunded, I will work on change in my free time, and that will take some time.

With best regards

Petr Kubánek
rts2.org

Hi Petr,

I have been following the development of RTS2 for the past few years since besides INDI, RTS2 is the only other solution available for astronomical device and data acquisition under Linux. At any rate, there are no INDI scheduler/autonomous observatory manager, and this has been in the back of my mind for quite a while, but it is a great undertaking to develop a decent heuristic scheduler and I'm pretty busy as it is with Ekos/INDI. Regarding funding, I've been in preliminary talks with a local agency that supports engineering research and while it looks promising, I'm not sure if it will be approved, but one of the items I presented to them was the need for a scheduler so if it gets approved, I'll certainly involve you.

Meanwhile, please let me know if you need any help in the port effort or in the development of the scheduler as it pertains to INDI. Thank you for your post and welcome to INDI!