This is a puzzle for me and I wonder if anyone can help with a resolution or suggestions.
I changed my observatory PC some months ago from W7 to W10 Home 64-bit. All my applications and devices work as they should (and did in W7) except my ROR ascom dome driver. The roof control box is connected via a USB lead directly to the PC. I have checked and can confirm that it is connected to a USB2 port in the new W10 PC and not to a USB3 port.
Previously with my old W7 laptop, in SGP I could select the ascom driver directly in the sequence window (already set in Equipment Profile) and connect. Now using the W10 PC I have to connect to the ascom driver via POTH, and everything works as expected. When I try to connect directly I receive an error message that ‘no driver is detected’.
In Windows control panel/devices the USB driver for the roof is clearly shown as connected and displays in the window along with my other devices. The usb properties for power management are disabled. I can connect directly to the roof using Hitec Astro’s windows application, but do not connect this way when using SGP as only one connection should be made.
I have Maxim DL which I used to use with Per Frejvall’s ModelMaker to build models for GM1000HPS mount (I no longer use Maxim as I now use the brilliant MountWizzard built by Michel, “mworion” which uses SGP and its API calls). In MaximDL I can connect directly to the roof ascom driver.
Would anybody have an idea why in W10 SGP is not able to connect directly to the driver but it can via POTH?
Logs:
This log is when trying to connect directly to the driver, log1direct
This log is when connecting via POTH which is always successful, log2POTH
I have not raised this as an issue as everything works fine connecting via POTH. I have raised it with the technical support of Hitec Astro in the UK - no reply yet.
Thanks for any help and suggestions of what to investigate/test.
Both logs seems to show that the connection involves POTH Hub, but there’s very little in the one that fails to say why, no errors are reported. The good one does report CanSetAzimuth as false, this is expected for a roll off roof but the bad one reports nothing.
Do you have an alternative dome control program that you can use to test the ASCOM dome operation? One might be the ASCOM Conform application, this should test the full dome driver functionality. For a roof it will open and close the shutter. It provides good logging of how things work and a log would be very useful. Conform is available from the ASCOM site, Conformance Checking
I installed Conform and ran the test for Dome after selecting the HitecAstro driver.
The test could not complete, log here, logConform.
I had 4 error message boxes appear (screen capture for example here, ScreenCapture). Clicking Continue the conform test advanced a little until the next error message box, all appear identical to my untrained eye.
Can you open your dome driver and connect to it prior to having SGP connect to the ASCOM driver? Some ASCOM drivers ship with an EXE which you can launch without having a client application connect first. This is typically how I would connect to my Gemini as I don’t generally want the connection to be tied to an application.
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