on Thursday, October 30, 2003 - 05:10 PM GMT - 2979 Reads
The ASCOM Initiative announced the eleventh release of its standards-based software platform for program control and scripting automation of astronomy instruments...
Supported by twenty three commercial astronomy equipment and software vendors, the ASCOM Platform 3.0 provides a set of scriptable objects for a wide variety of telescope and focuser devices. The drivers themselves have been written by fourteen different authors, indicative of the rapid growth and acceptance of ASCOM throughout the astronomy community.
For more information, go online to the ASCOM web site at:
To download the Platform, click on the Downloads link at the above page.
New things since Platform 2.3 (August 2003), in no particular order:
(1) Major upgrade to Astro-Physics driver (Sehgal)
(2) New unified Celestron driver that implements proposed V2 Telescope spec (Rowland)
(3) New unified Gemini driver (Sehgal)
(4) Meade driver has increased resolution for new Autostar firmware.
(5) Major upgrades to Telescope and Focuser simulators (Brewster)
(6) New RoboFocus Control Program with ASCOM Focuser support (Brewster)
(7) TheSky Driver now supports TPOINT protection via SYNC-inhibit, and also uses new Orchestrate-free interface that appeared in TheSky 5.00.100. (Denny)
(8) New C#.NET Telescope and Dome templates with Serial wrapper class (Fay)
(9) New Windows Script Component template for Telescope (Denny)
(10) Helper's Util.WaitForMilliseconds() now uses the Windows multi-media timer and WaitForSingleObject() to provide high-resolution accurate delays under 500ms. No events are pumped for waits under 500ms. (Denny)
(11) New Dome simulator (Brewster)
(12) New Dome controller middleware (George)
(13) New ASCOM plugin for Chris Marriott's SkyMap Pro (Crossley)
(14) New generic telescope and dome hub with embedded dome control middleware. (Brewster)
(15) New MSDN-style Dome spec document (Denny)
(16) TeleAPI and StarryNight plugins disconnect scope before releasing object instances, for .NET compatibility. (Denny)
(17) Meade driver now turns on long format for Autostar I controllers. This requires the latest Meade firmware. (Denny)
(18) Many other small adjustments per user inputs (various)
(19) All drivers and tools re-versioned and recompiled for 3.0 (Denny)
