Aspect

Description

Aspect is a simple PEC tool.

Aspect was created to semi-automate the process of teaching PEC (periodic error correction) for Rajiva's EQ6/HEQ5 MCU Upgrade kit and the LittleFoot astronomical mount stepper controler.

Documentation

There is an in-depth Aspect manual in German language, kindly provided by Jörg Bayer:
Aspect-Dokumentation.pdf (1.6 MB)

There are English instructions in the user documentation section of the Doxygen generated doc, but these are very rudimentary and partly outdated. I'm planning to translate Jörg's manual as soon as I find time.

You can find some background on Aspect's development in this discussion thread on the LittleFoot support forum (you probably need to be registered at the forum to access that thread).

See the changelog for Aspect's current development state, and the todo-list for what's on my plan.

Known Issues

The latest Aspect version is recommended for use with firmware v4.00 and newer.

Note that Aspect v0.7 is the last version tested by me with firmware v3.59. You can use newer Aspect versions with firmware v3.59 to generate PEC tables, but there are reports that some of the communication features with the MCU are broken, specifically the ones on the first tab page (switching tracking rate, PEC on/off, ...). I most probably won't fix these, as I have no hardware to test with older firmware anymore.

Screenshots

Version 0.1:

   

Aspect "Firstlight":

Object: M81/M82 Optics: Orion Newton 8"/f4.4 Mount: Vixen GP, LittleFoot, unguided with a PEC table from Aspect Camera: Canon EOS30d Exposure: 112 x 2 minutes at ISO1600 medium image (880x587, 477 kB) large image (1761x1174, 2.2 MB)

Contact

Aspect is written by Wolfgang Hoffmann

If you like Aspect, find bugs, have feature requests or any other comments, feel free to contact me by email or on the MCU support forum.

When reporting a problem, please provide good documentation of what you did.
Specifically, keep all PE-files you measured and name them sanely, save all PEC-tables to files besides uploading them to the MCU, and copy the internal Aspect Logfile (menu Tools->Settings->Logfiles). Please send me these files when reporting a bug, it helps me a lot to analyse and fix errors.

Finally: I'm writing this software as musing in my spare time, so don't expect miracles ;-)

Credits

Many thanks to the friendly people at the LittleFoot support forum who contributed to this project, especially Rajiva for providing me some insight into how PEC works, Doug for substantially helping me with starting the Aspect project (he even shared his MCU Plus sourcecode with me), Christian for early beta testing, and of course Jörg for the great German manual.

Also thanks to the people from Trolltech for making the great Qt toolkit, and for releasing it unter the GPL.

And thanks to Stefan Sander for providing the QExtSerialPort class, which Aspect uses for communicating over the serial port.

License

Copyright (C) 2006-2007 by Wolfgang Hoffmann

This program is free software, licensed under the GPL v2. See the file COPYING for more details.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Download

Source package:
aspect-0.10.0.tar.gz (239 KB), 03.06.2007

Older versions:
aspect-0.9.0.tar.gz (145 KB)
aspect-0.8.2.tar.gz (143 KB)
aspect-0.8.1.tar.gz (143 KB)
aspect-0.8.tar.gz (141 KB)
aspect-0.7.tar.gz (110 KB)
aspect-0.6.tar.gz (104 KB)
aspect-0.5.tar.gz (100 KB)
aspect-0.4.tar.gz (100 KB)
aspect-0.3.tar.gz (96.3 KB)
aspect-0.2.tar.gz (42.6 KB)
aspect-0.1.tar.gz (18.8 KB)

This is testet to compile under Linux and Windows:

• On Linux, you need to install the Qt4 development packages provided by your Linux distribution (e.g. qt4-dev-tools on Debian/Ubuntu). Beware of conflicts when Qt3 development packages are installed in parallel (the Qt3 runtime packages are no problem).
  
• On Windows, vou need to install the Qt4 Open Source Edition, and the minimal MinGW package as suggested by the Qt installer.
  

After unpackaging Aspect, change to the base directory and issue

qmake
make

For building the Doxygen doc (Linux only), issue

make doc

For convenience, here is a prebuilt Windows executable:
aspect.exe (v 0.10.0) (697 KB), 03.06.2007

Older versions:
aspect.exe (v 0.9.0) (597 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.8.2) (570 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.8.1) (569 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.8) (547 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.7) (394 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.6) (371 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.5) (359 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.4) (359 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.3) (308 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.2) (225 KB)
aspect.exe (v 0.1) (122 KB)

To run the windows executable, you need the Qt4 and MinGW runtime DLLs. If you don't have these installed, download them from here and place them into the same directory as aspect.exe:
QtCore4.dll (version 4.2.2) (1.8 MB)
QtGui4.dll (version 4.2.2) (7.5 MB)
mingwm10.dll (15.6 KB)

Changelog

See the changelog section of the Doxygen generated doc.