[Kstars-devel] status of INDI devices

[Alessio Sangalli]

Jasem Mutlaq wrote:

> Great! I'll be waiting for your report and hopefully all issues can be resolved before KDE 3.2 is out! 

ok!!!

kstars worked very, very good!!! It's amazing. I didn't have any
problem!!! (I have a celestron nexstar 114GT telescope)

Or, better... I had some problems, I will try to explain better.

When the telescope is connected, I can slew to and track any object,
it's working very well for all the objects in the sky. Also when the
telescope is moving, kstars reports the actual position in a very
precise way. That's cool.
The problems are *before* connecting the telescope. I had to retry many
times to connect. The "Indi control panel" has in my opinion some bugs
and should be changed a bit. Let me explain: I start the INDI server
manually:

indiserver -v -r 0 -p 8000 celestrongps

then I have to connect the client in the device manager. There are no
problems. When I access the INDI control panel, I have to say that the
layout of the window is not so comfortable: I have to use the scroll
bars to access the content of the panel. The "Current" column is not
resizable so I have to maximize the whole window. Then I always have to
type in the device of my serial port, which is /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of
the default of /dev/ttyS0. It would be cool that kstars could remember
this setting. When I press set and I try to connect, I *always* have a
problem that the device is not recognized because it seems there is one
more character after the string "USB0": I paste the error message:

2003-12-13T01:27:19 Error connecting to port /dev/ttyUSB0

if I double click again in the "set" column, and I press enter, most of
the times the problem is solved.

Then I press "Connect". Sometimes the Indi server exits, and on the
graphical interface there is a message that saying that the Indi server
has closed the connection. I have to do everything from the beginning...
Otherwise, if then the program can connect to the telescope, everything
is perfect. I've used the program to change from an object to another
for at least half an hour and everything was very smooth then.

I think the program should be fine tuned in the indi control panel
and/or in the indi server, for example it could retry more times to
connect to the device before exiting...

I hope my report was useful! I can't wait to show my system with kstars
to the friends of the observing group!

bye!
Alessio Sangalli