We recently purchased an older Astro Haven Dome with a 9 pin serial interface. We would like to automate it to use NINA. We only need to open and close it. There is one ASCOM driver of Github but was last worked on in 2019 and probably needs a newer dome interface. It appears to be possible to automate it with .bat files which we are working on now. Is anyone aware of a working ASCOM driver which might work.
Seeking working ASCOM driver for older Astro Haven dome automation
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we’d also be interested in a newer Astrohaven Ascom driver!
If we can’t find one, we’ll write in ourselves
Neil
If Alpaca is an option, try working with an LLM on it; I had a good experience creating an Alpaca driver for my home made observatory…
There is ASCOM driver on github (https://github.com/T0T4R4/astrohaven-dome-ascom) which does not have an .exe file to install it so you must compile it and create an installation program. I was able to do this but it did not work on our legacy dome. It might work with a newer dome. Instead, with the help of AI, I wrote python scripts which allow us to open and close the dome half at a time. We run these outside of NINA but I think they can be executed within NINA if needed.
Better news is that Foster Systems wrote an ASCOM driver for it which the previous owner discovered they still had and are sending it to us. I am not sure what extras it offers but it was used on our dome so it might be an improvement from the python scripts. The Foster website shows it for sale for over $200 but the link was dead and I did not pursue it further.
I will post again after we try the Foster driver.
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