"Mount does not support the Pulse Guide interface"

[Gregory Pieschala]

I am trying to use both The Sky X (for pointing and slewing) and PHD2 (for guiding) on my Takahashi EM400 Temma 2 mount.  I run both as an administrator and, while the mount is connected to The Sky X" I start PHD2 and  select the ASCOM Telescope Driver for The SKY as the telescope.  When PHD2 tries to connect to the mount it appears to be successful but I get the message "Mount does not support the Pulse Guide interface".  Any ideas on what this means and what I should try?  I should add that I am able to connect with the mount if I am not running The Sky X using the ASCOM Temma driver.

[Andy Galasso]

Hi Gregory,

Pulse Guide is the ASCOM driver command that guide programs like PHD2 use to send guide corrections to the mount.  The message is saying that the ASCOM driver does not allow Pulse Guide commands.  That could either be a limitation of the ASCOM driver, or else something that happens to be disabled in the ASCOM driver settings. I suspect the latter because we have other users using the SkyX ASCOM driver.  Sorry I don't have more information for you about specifically what ASCOM driver setting you would need to change.  If you don't get any answers in this forum you could try asking in the SB forum specifically about how to enable ASCOM pulse guide commands capability in the SkyX ASCOM driver.

Andy

[bw_msgboard]

Hi Greg.  I’ve been working on a similar problem with another user and can offer some comments.  I don’t own TheSkyX so I’ve only used it quickly in a remote support session.  But it looks like the user interface for choosing a mount has become very complicated.  This is my impression of how things stand.  There are two ways for TheSkyX to control a mount – through its proprietary software or via the third-party ASCOM driver for the mount.  Those things don’t appear to be the same and they result in different setup challenges.  If you choose a mount driver that looks like “Driver for telescope connected through TheSky”, you will be using the proprietary driver.  In that case, I *think* you need to install and configure this plug-in for TheSkyX:

 

http://www.bisque.com/sc/media/p/112531.aspx

 

Even if that plug-in is already installed, you’ll need to configure it this way in order to get pulse-guiding and pointing information:

 

https://github.com/OpenPHDGuiding/phd2/wiki/SkyX-Settings

 

 

A second alternative is to make TheSkyX use the independent third-party ASCOM driver which, of course, supports pulse-guiding.  In TheSkyX, you have to poke around in the mount setup window and find the choice for ‘ASCOM’.  Then you have to click on the ‘Properties’ button to choose the actual ASCOM driver you want.  For you, that would be ‘Temma by Takahashi’.  This evidently changes the behavior of TheSkyX to some extent – I think you have to first do a ‘connect’ and then a ‘synch’ in order for TheSkyX to know where the scope is pointing.  

 

Obviously, you need to use the same mount choice for both PHD2 and TheSkyX.  There is no need that I’m aware of to run these apps in Administrator mode and that’s normally discouraged for security reasons.  In the brief testing I did remotely, neither app was run in Admin mode.  

 

If this sounds incredibly confusing, I agree.  L 

 

Good luck – please let us know where you end up so we can offer better advice going forward,

 

Bruce

 

---

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open PHD Guiding" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-phd-guidi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/5a1303f7-3c35-48de-939b-201cb07788e4%40googlegroups.com.

[Iver]

The Temma 2 mounts don't have native pulse guide! Chuck's Temma ASCOM driver does have a work around that Chuck added to his driver. Maybe when you are using the sky 10 you are using the Sky driver? If you can connect to Chuck's ASCOM driver through the Sky 10 it should work.

Hope this helps!