Has anybody heard anything further regarding the ASCOM Driver for DDW and the random timeout messages that ACP ends up reporting? My assumption has always been that there is a timing bug in the ASCOM Driver that only shows up once and a while. The symptom is either that under ACP Control, the dome will randomly stop slaving, or ACP produces an error (exception timeout DDW), and terminates the script. I have been in touch with the folks at DDW (Technical Innovations) quite a while ago, and even though they said they were working on getting support for the driver, so far I have not heard anything. This kind of puts a fly in the ointment of a fully automated observatory when you get these random timeouts!

If nothing comes along soon, I know that Cyanogen offers dome control electronics (with ASCOM Drivers) that can be retrofitted to existing dome motors, but the cost is fairly high.

Am I alone?


Paul