Lens control

I would like to see the lens control for lenses. I recently became more interested in wide field imaging and would love to use my 400mm lens

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I second that. The ability to focus via the motors on camera is a phenomenal feature. I use it with qdslrdashboard all the time. If I could integrate that into SGP… well, maybe I’d guide :smile:

Maybe what’s needed is ASCOM interfaces for the DSLR camera and focuser, then it would fit into SGP with no work needed by Jared and Ken.

Chris

If only we knew someone who was an ASCOM developer that could help us out with that. :smiley:

I don’t know how that works.

Contact me off line and we can discuss my fee for doing this.

I think we went down this line once with the dual-chip SBIG cameras. It ended up with an empty thread on CN and Jared wrote support for it via SGP/PHD2.

I can do this with BYEOS (not Nikon yet, he’s working on it). I can do this already with several already written programs not designed for astronomy (qDSLRDashboard is one of them, price is free).

Perhaps Ken and Jared would allow you to provide the code and make it an add-on module for SGP? You’d have a captive audience and I think given the number of people who do DSLR/multiple camera with lenses, it might be a good fit?

I’ll gladly pay you a fee for it when it’s available.

Chris

I had a look at the lens focus control and from what I can see it’s relative only, that applies to both Canon and Nikon.

The model that works well for providing ASCOM drivers professionally is for the hardware manufacturers to pay for it. Their hardware acts as a big dongle so there’s no need to provide any security. Doing a paid for driver independently would need a lot of additional security code and support.

If you look at the time and expertise involved drivers are quite expensive. The ASCOM side is pretty easy, we have provided templates, documentation and support foc, but hooking into the hardware can be quite challenging.

Chris

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Yea, I agree. I’m guessing Nikon isn’t going to pony up though. Honestly, I’d take live view and the ability to manually drive the ficuser similar to what qdslrdashboard does.

On the flip side, relative focusing works if you have very little backlash. For instance,my Nikon 300mm f/2.8 is really tight. You could make it so you could ‘fake’ absolute focusing.