Sky Tracker Telescope Driver

[jrobparsons]

I forked the repository today to start developing a Sky Tracker telescope driver.

Is anyone else doing this development?

Background...

Sky Commander and Sky Tracker were developed by Sky Engineering (www.skyeng.com). Sky Commander adds Digital Setting Circles (DSC) to a telescope. Sky Tracker adds motors to a telescope. Interconnected together, they add GOTO to a telescope.

A telescope driver for Sky Commander has already been developed. It is used when a telescope is a PUSHTO (only DSC is installed).

The Raleigh Astronomy Club (Raleigh, NC USA) received a Starmaster 20 Truss Tube Dobsonian Telescope with Sky Commander and Sky Tracker installed. The Sky Tracker box was upgraded last year to support telescope commands over its RS232 port.

If anyone knows that work to develop a Sky Tracker telescope driver is already in progress, please let me know before I get too deep into this project.

Thanks.
Rob Parsons
Raleigh, NC USA

[knro]

I don't believe anyone is working on this driver. Please let us know how it goes and if you have any questions!

[jrobparsons]

What is the preferred development environment?

1. I cloned the forked repo to a Raspberry Pi.

2. I followed these instructions:

   https://github.com/indilib/indi

   I used a script under "Build indi-core (script)" to build the indi-core.

3. I am working through the Project Setup instructions found here:

   https://docs.indilib.org/drivers/project-setup.html

4. When I run "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa", I get this message:

jrp@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/add-apt-repository", line 95, in
sp = SoftwareProperties(options=options)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/softwareproperties/SoftwareProperties.py", line 109, in init
self.reload_sourceslist()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/softwareproperties/SoftwareProperties.py", line 599, in reload_sourceslist
self.distro.get_sources(self.sourceslist)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/aptsources/distro.py", line 91, in get_sources
raise NoDistroTemplateException(
aptsources.distro.NoDistroTemplateException: Error: could not find a distribution template for Raspbian/bullseye
jrp@raspberrypi:~ $

5. Here is my development environment:

jrp@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 6.1.21+ #1642 Mon Apr 3 17:19:14 BST 2023 armv6l GNU/Linux
jrp@raspberrypi:~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description: Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release: 11
Codename: bullseye
jrp@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/issue
Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 \n \l

jrp@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"
jrp@raspberrypi:~ $

[knro]

The PPA is for Ubuntu, not Debian. You can need to follow the instructions in the https://github.com/indilib/indi project.

Download and use VSCode to open the project, then you can compile it in there and test drivers.