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SS7, Alpaca, and iOS - error codes and how to get support

Hello,

Long-time SkySafari user on iOS, recently upgraded to version 7, and was happy to see that the ASCOM Alpaca telescope control protocol is being supported. We run a large home brew telescope (30-inch Newtonian) at our club's observatory. The telescope is controlled by Maestro software, used mostly by professional observatories. We run an older version (3.0) of Maestro, but fortunately, it works pretty well with a core subset of Alpaca commands. For example, we use SharpCap for live-stacking on our public nights, and we can control the scope over Alpaca from SharpCap to do plate-solve-and-recenter.

Much to my surprise and pleasure, when I pointed my iPhone / SkySafari at our Alpaca installation, it not only connected, but also synced the SS7 screen to the current coordinates of the scope!

Maestro does not support MoveAxis command so I can't test the SS7 panning commands, but when I tried to initial a GoTo, I got some error codes. Unfortunately I was not logging, and did not write down the error codes. I will be able to re-test soon.

Where can I go to get support / debugging for this new functionality?  

Thanks

David McCallie / Powell Observatory / Astro Society of Kansas City

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5 comments

  • 0
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    Pedro Braganca

    Hi David, you can post here or even join our beta tester group - where you get early access to any updates we are working on.  Regards.

  • 0
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    David McCallie

    Thanks.  Here's a start - a snippet of code from the error log when I tried to get SkySafari to trigger a GoTo on the telescope via Alpaca, connected to an instance of Astrometric's Maestro software (Version 3.0, rather old, but works otherwise just fine.) The error appears to be: 

    400 GetParameter - Supplied argument 1.359856e+01 for parameter RightAscension can not be converted to a floating point value

    Note that SkySafari is able to track the scope's movements just fine.

    Also note that MoveAxis is not supported by Maestro, but I can live without that. GoTo is what I'd really like to have working! An extended clip of the log is here:

    http://192.168.1.140:11111/api/v1/telescope/0/rightascension?ClientID=1505670063&ClientTransactionID=165
    Received ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:11 with error 0:
    {"Value":13.719416666666668,"ClientTransactionID":165,"ServerTransactionID":38027,"ErrorNumber":0,"ErrorMessage":"","DriverException":null}
    Sent ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:11 with error 0:
    http://192.168.1.140:11111/api/v1/telescope/0/declination?ClientID=1505670063&ClientTransactionID=166
    Received ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:11 with error 0:
    {"Value":28.265833333333333,"ClientTransactionID":166,"ServerTransactionID":38028,"ErrorNumber":0,"ErrorMessage":"","DriverException":null}
    Sent ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:11 with error 0:
    http://192.168.1.140:11111/api/v1/telescope/0/slewtocoordinatesasync
    Received ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:11 with error 0:
    400 GetParameter - Supplied argument 1.359856e+01 for parameter RightAscension can not be converted to a floating point value
    Sent ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:12 with error 0:
    http://192.168.1.140:11111/api/v1/telescope/0/slewing?ClientID=1505670063&ClientTransactionID=168
    Received ASCII at 2021/12/02 05:41:12 with error 0:
    {"Value":false,"ClientTransactionID":168,"ServerTransactionID":38030,"ErrorNumber":0,"ErrorMessage":"","DriverException":null}

    Thanks in advance.

    David McCallie

     

  • 0
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    Pedro Braganca

    Thank you David.  Our devs will take a look.

    DevOps reference: https://starrynight.unfuddle.com/a#/projects/7965/tickets/by_number/1646

  • 0
    Avatar
    David McCallie

    This bug appears to have been fixed in the latest release of the Alpaca Remote Service executable, downloadable from the Alpaca github site.

    I was able to test this with SS7 on iOS (test flight edition) and using my Alpaca simulator, and the bug is gone!

    I will have to wait to test it with the Astrometric's Maestro implementation, but I suspect that it will be fixed there as well, since it appears to have been an Alpaca bug related to parsing of certain kinds floating point number encodings.

  • 0
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    Pedro Braganca

    Excellent result! Thank you David.

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