The closest thing in INDI In focus timer with variable speed focuser but I think From the way u described It is that if u pressed any of these buttons then it moves in particular speed either in or out and then stops unless u press again? How long does it take for each speed to finish the motion? I eed to know thiz in order to proceed?

It's almost immediate I think.

One single click moves 1 step at the given speed (or in other words, it moves a given amount of degrees). But if you keep it pressed, the focus point keeps moving at the given speed as long as the button is pressed.

I'm thinking now, I imagine that this kind of focusers are not straight-forward. Maybe an option would be to proceed in two steps ...

1) Move at the maximum rate in individual steps until we get a reasonably HFR (until the 'coarse minimum').
2) Move at the minimum rate to build the fine V curve.

The most useful improvement here I think is the individual manual-focus buttons in order to be able to keep them pressed as long as we want. Autofocus would be a nice feature to have, but you should evaluate how difficult it would be to have it implemented. I would say that it's not critical, I have lived with the manual focus of APT until now .

In any case, thank you very much Jasem .

Ok, the way Ekos operates relative focusers with variable speeds is that it issues at timer (say 1 second) to focus in or out, then remeasures HFR and proceeds. Therefore, the GPhoto focuser interface must take two arguments, focus IN or OUT, and a timer. The user has to select the speed manually. The key here is how to translate say 1000ms timer to how many commands are sent to the camera, since there is no feedback that the operation is actually complete. Do you think it's reasonable to issue a new motion command every 250ms or 500ms? Once this is done by the driver, it would be easy to control the focus operation whether manual or automated from INDI & Ekos.

500ms should be fine I think even for the 'maximum rate', but it won't surprise me if we can even go with shorter commands.

I found an interesting webpage,

dslrcontroller.com/guide-rmf_focuspull.php

It says that this software is able to send at most 10 commands per second (100ms)

Ok, I updated the driver to use the timer method, so if you set 500, it will move it once, 1000, twice and so on. Let's test it at 500 then check if we can reduce that. Of course, you need latest libindi & GPhoto driver along with latest Ekos.

Small bugs I encountered during compilation

gphoto_ccd.h:89:9:

I suppose it should be

bool Move(FocusDirection dir, int speed, int duration);

instead of

int Move(FocusDirection dir, int speed, int duration);

The same in gphoto_ccd.cpp:907

bool GPhotoCCD::Move(FocusDirection dir, int speed, int duration)

instead of int ...


Now, I'm ready to test

That's not a bug, you need to update libindi and install, THEN compile indi-gphoto and install.

You're right, I see 'compile&install' script has failed to download libindi changes!. Ok, I will test now and let you know.

Thanks!

It moves the focuser, but only in 1 direction (both with in/out).

It's a different approach (in the manual focus way) to the one I'm used to though.
I'm not saying it's better or worse, just different. I assume that you're developing it this way to make it easier for the autofocus algorithm, in that case, it's fine. .

can you update indi-gphoto again? I added a debugging statement to check why it's not moving in two directions as it is supposed to. Just compile, then under "Options" tab enable Debug, then enable "Driver Debug". When ever you issue a new focusing command, it should should say something like "Setting Focuser Speed to ##". Let me know what you get in both cases (Focus in and out).

2014-01-25T17:12:10: Setting focuser speed to 0
2014-01-25T17:12:09: Setting focuser speed to 0
2014-01-25T17:12:05: Setting focuser speed to 0
2014-01-25T17:11:27: Setting focuser speed to 0

The first two are printed after a focus in, the others after pressing focus out

It gives an error if setting the focus speed
2014-01-25T17:13:28: Focuser does not support variable speed.

Don't know if it's related.

Yup, it was missing a function from the focuser interface, can you try again please?