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Do Not Use FTDI and Profilic Serial-USB Drivers in the Same Setup

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I had a look at my installation to see if I could pin down what the latest version (3.5.5) of KStars offers. This is a screen shot showing the Indi control panel and the (serial) Device Port Selector screens.
 
The two serial devices are the Pegasus PPB with a Prolific chip and the EQMOD mount driven by a Lynx Astro USB to serial cable with an FTDI chip which these days seem to work happily enough together.
 
2 years 6 months ago #76752
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Avocette, You are lucky.
I see that you are running Windows and I am running macOS.
May be the macOS version of KStars is the problem ?
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2 years 6 months ago #76754

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Hi Avo,

I've messed around quite a lot with this and it's all a tad confusing :-( - for something so apparently simple it's bizarre ! I now strongly suspect that in this case it is a buggy driver implementation. I don't know which piece has the dodgy implementation, whether it be Astroberry/Debian/INDI et al or a straight defect in this particular driver.

I've used FTDI, Prolific, and the bargain bucket jobs for MANY years. I've never had a problem like this.
I'm pretty sure it's not the prolific hardware per se. If it was, they'd be out of business :-)

Looks like my options are buy or make something.

I have the bits to make something, just can't locate a verified pin-out diagram. Looks like FLO will be getting an order :-)

Oh, thanks for taking the time to make the screen shot.

Best

c
2 years 6 months ago #76755

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@ Avo

forgot to say that this looks like a Prolific pl2303 driver problem specifically
2 years 6 months ago #76756

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And that's a bad one and they are bad quality. I stopped using profilic (that exact model) once it burned my HEQ5 MCU!!!
Almost had a fire because of it. Very dangerous. Profilic no more... at least for me
2 years 6 months ago #76757

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Hi nMac,

the range of experiences with all this stuff is really quite odd. Makes you wonder if it just all depends on which side of the bed you got out of :-)

Best,

c
2 years 6 months ago #76758

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Hi Collin, yes it seems so :-) I had it working for more than a year until disaster arrived.
But I had more experiences with profilic chipsets and in general they dont play well with other chipsets.
Last edit: 2 years 6 months ago by nMAC.
2 years 6 months ago #76759

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Of course it’s only the Windows implementation of VNC Viewer that’s showing what’s going on in my RPi. The KStars/Ekos/Indi is all running under the Raspberry Pi OS version of Debian.
Last edit: 2 years 6 months ago by Avocette.
2 years 6 months ago #76760

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I don’t know where I read it, but it seems there are some genuine Prolific PL2303s out there but a lot of fake ones….
2 years 6 months ago #76761

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Hi Avo,

Yep, I guessed it was vnc or similar :-)

I'm just saying is there APPEARS to be something flakey going on in relationship to the pl2303 driver.

Do you know if your Pegasus is using the "standard" Prolific pl2303 driver ? It would just be interesting to know

Best,

c
2 years 6 months ago #76762

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@Avo

Yes, there are many reports of cloned/fake so-called prolific chips.

However, do bear in mind that in this instance (Eq6-r Pro) Well, I'd like (Hope) to think Skywatcher buys direct from Prolific ? :-)

Best,

c
2 years 6 months ago #76763

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My guess is that Pegasus Astro would also be keen to buy direct from Prolific. 
By the way my other mount ( SW AZ/EQ5) has a built-in Prolific chip, and I can swap over the direct USB cable link to a Hitecastro USB to Serial cable. It turns out this cable also has a Prolific chip in it, and the only software change I need to make is to go from 115200 baud to 9600.
2 years 6 months ago #76764

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