ASA focuser requirements

[rat156]

Hi All,

 

Over the past few months my Sbig camera has been failing due to corruption of the firmware.  This has led me to do two things, reinstall all my software from scratch, including The Sky X Pro (Mac) and the ASA OK3 Focuser software running under a new Win 7 64 bit vmware emulator.  My whole imaging setup is run off one Mac Mini, as there is no Mac solution for the OK3, I am forced to run Windows somewhere and I chose to do it this way.  It was working really well until a piece of software somewhere decided to rewrite the firmware of the camera randomly.  The other thing I have done is build a new partition running Windows 7 x64 natively and install the Windows version of The Sky X etc.

 

Whilst building both PC's (one virtual, one native) I ran into the same problem with the ASA focuser software.  When freshly installed the program would fail to load with an Active X exception (runtime error 427, I think).  I tackled the problem over the weekend and have discovered an undocumented feature of the ASA focus control software.  It requires the Microsoft visual C++ redistributable to be installed.  There is nothing in the installer about this, nor anything in the hardware manual, the software manual also has nothing on installation and is only available for the previous version of the ASA controller software.  This fact was discovered by installing ASCOM 6.5, which installs the redistributable as part of its installation.

 

This information may be common knowledge amongst tech savvy Windows users, but for people who use Macs, the whole driver issue and required software interdependency thing is totally new.  I am used to plugging and playing.

 

So my advice to anyone who is having trouble with this software is to ensure that the C++ redistributable is installed and at the latest version, while you're at it the Microsoft DotNet should also be brought up to date, I'm not sure if it affects this software, but it is a comms related piece of software so can't hurt.

 

Anyway, on the one computer I now have two working partitions, now awaiting clear skies to see if my firmware issue has been resolved.

 

Cheers

Stuart