andrewlockwood

I installed my AAF3 about 6 years ago now, and have always been irritated by the long usb cable that snakes around the mount. When I bought it, I was assured that there would be a wireless control solution available shortly for it. Has anybody ever used this, and does anyone know how to get it to work? I'm waiting to be allowed to download the drivers, but I wouldn't be surprised if this focuser is obsolete now. regards, Andrew.

I have to agree, although after many trials I have got my system working as well as I can, it's clear that ASA have no interest in the amateur market. I happen to be on the board of a major public observatory and we are securing funding to install a couple of metre class telescopes over the next few years. Based on my personal experience, these will not be from ASA. Although I have nothing but praise for the professionalism and courtesy of the support staff, they can only do so much, and these problems should not have got to the point where something needed to be done!

I have had a similar problem with my 16", the secondary deteriorated like yours after one year, and now, 5 years after purchase the primary has patches a few cm square where the aluminising has completely failed. ASA were very good about helping me get the secondary aluminized in Australia, as it is not economic to ship it back to Europe, but I'm very disappointed that the coating on the primary is so bad and assume I will have to pay for that myself. Also of the 5 fans on the scope, only 2 are working after 5 years. I assume they're just normal CPU fans and I'll get that fixed when I send the primary off for recoating.

I had similar issues with the computer installing the newer usb drivers for the mount, and used the command line pnputil to list, then removed all the drivers from the system. I did the same thing with the gps drivers. You can also roll back the usb drivers in the device manager in windows and set the system to never upgrade drivers. I did this a few months ago, and have been trouble free for a while.

Getting the sequence AF routine required a bit more parameter tuning, and we've only had two clear nights in the last month, but I did get it working last night. Now I'm wondering how to get it to focus for the filter that is currently in use, rather than switching back to the first one each time. The incompatibility with Sequence Generator Pro comes from the fact that the focuser position is reported in microns, and since the last digit is constantly hunting back and forth SGPro times out waiting for the focuser to stop at the requested position. So it's probably a combination of both, but perhaps the absolute position encoder needs some sort of low pass filter on it.

I was successfully using sequence generator pro to drive the camera and do the sequencing with a DDM85, QSI683, scopedome and robofocus. This worked perfectly until I got the new 16" with the 'unfinished' ACC focuser driver. Although this thing is covered with wireless antennae, absolute encoders, etc it is preventing me from using the autofocus routines that come in sequence generator because the reported position is not constant. Now I'm forced to use sequence I am unable to get the autofocus routine in that to work either! It moves in all sorts of directions randomly and always fails to find focus! Grrr. Absolutely no response from ASA support either on when the full functionality of this ludicrously expensive focuser will be unleashed. And of course tonight, the first clear night in 5 weeks (!!) and windows 10 upgraded the usb drivers (despite me telling it to never ever do this!) so I lost the cameras after the first sub, had to uninstall, power off, etc.... I'm missing my G11 :-( and I'm missing my 10" with the simple robofocus unit that just worked...

Thanks Bernard - I've got the ASCOM developer's kit, the MS Visual studio installed, and am already working through the ASCOM example focus driver. Maybe in 10 years time I'll have figured out how to call an ascom driver from within another ascom driver.. Hopefully ASA will take pity on me before them and release a new driver for this focuser that solves all my problems. I'm also quite bemused by the wireless electronics in the focuser that don't do anything yet... I wonder when these features will be released to their owners?

Thanks Bernard, a dummy focuser driver might be all that is needed. It would be simple enough, an integer division by 2 or 3 in each direction would probably do the trick. Unfortunately for me, the last time I was doing a lot of programming Fortran 95 was still pretty new and cool. I have absolutely no idea how to write an ascom driver, but I guess I will be learning. Thanks - I agree, it's all about being able to sleep. And I suspect you are being very modest about your own images, Do you have an astrobin account or similar?

Hi Mark, I only had one night to test the 16" a few months back to see how well it held focus, and it wasn't as stable as yours, requiring refocusing every hour due to both collimation shift and thermal changes. Now I've got the system together in one place again I'll try again as I seemed to have eliminated a fair bit of the collimation shift by tightening the spider a little. I agree that 1-2 um does not constitute a significant change as the critical focus zone for this scope is about 30 um - but it's the impact on the sequence software that is doing my head in. Interesting to hear that you're getting by with sequence, so maybe it's worth chasing down whatever's causing the crashes.

Thanks - I can understand why it might be hard to hold a Crayford style focuser within a micron, but this 'upgraded' focuser means my entire observatory is effectively useless for mosyt of the time as it cannot run unattended. I have yet to get sequence to take more than 4 images in a row before either it or Maxim crashes, so switching to another sequence program is not really n option. My 25 year old JMI crayford and robofocus used to do exactly what it was told, so I have a choice between putting my old 10" newtonian back in the observatory, or buying another $3000 focuser from moonlight or feather touch so I can use my 16".

If your gps stick driver gets 'upgraded' by Windows10, it will no longer show up as a COM port, but as a 'sensor' in the devices. If this happens Autoslew will no longer recognise it. I also have the older u-blox 5 stick, and got upgraded by stealth. Rolling the driver back has fixed the issue for now.

Are there any other users out there with the new AAF3 focuser? I have one on my 16", and although I have no trouble connecting to it, I'd like to hear from others about how theirs behave in practice. I have problems using it with my sequencing software (SGPro). When SGPro sends an ASCOM request to tell the focuser to move to a position, the AAF3 will move to a position within 1 or 2 microns of the requested position and stop. The focuser then reports it's slightly wrong position, and this figure is constantly flickering back and forth a couple of microns. Unfortunately, if this position isn't exactly what SGPro told it to go to, the software complains that the focuser isn't listening, and stops the sequence. This probably occurs 10% of the time, and always after I've left the software running on a sequence. The authors of SGPro have refused my request to add in a focuser tolerance setting to their software, as they feel that a focuser should move exactly where it's told to, and then stay there, and if they tried to accommodate every hardware peculiarity they would not have a working product. Although I don't want to make comparisons between the ASA Sequence software and SGPro, anybody who has used both will understand why I'd like to retain SGPro as my main observatory control software. So can anyone else with an AAF3 tell me if this constant position change is normal, or should I expect greater stability from it? So far, repeated pleas to support have gone unanswered. regards, Andrew.

Hi - I had a similar problem. After installing GPScomplete and creating a new com port, Autoslew would not see the new com port. Instead, in device manager I selected the sensor and used: update driver - browse my computer for driver software - let me pick from a list of available drivers, and selected the bottom one that says USB serial device. Then the GPS showed up in the drivers under ports as "u-blox 6 GPS receiver (COM9)" If you've had a few goes at getting this to work, you may have multiple drivers installed. You can use the pnputils command in a cmd window to search out and remove all of the u-block .inf files and start again if there are more than one. I was then able to connect Autoslew to that com port, and after running the synch time to GPS command in autoslew it worked. regards, Andrew.