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Hi,

OK, I do not have a Gemini II but my impression is that we are making this button issue too complicated.

Let us think KISS. Let us sir behind the mount and observe the telescope on the RA and DEC axis. We have several movements and if we traduce this movements into the buttons I would say, as I already wrote before ...

Vertical buttons for RA and horizontal buttons for DEC.

RA goes forward (to the West) and backward (to the East)

DEC goes either Roght or left and using the horizontal buttons would move the front of the scope either to the right or the left ...

I hope this is correct.

So why change the direction of the buttons ? Is it really necessary ?

When I am standing in the front of the mount the directions would be the same eg. it is far easier to remember forward and backward as it is now.

I always get confused what my left and right button does in RA. 99% of the time I press the wrng direction because it is not intuitive.

OK, just my opinion and as I do not use a handcontroller anymore at the endeffect it does not matter anyhow :-)

BUT, I have the same problem when pressing the buttons on the GCC user interface and ther same problem will surely be when pressing the buttons in the ASCOM Gemini driver user interface. Totally unintuitive.

I have a blackboard in my warm room and everytime I want to press a button I have to look at it :-( so I do not go in the opposite direction ...

OK, René has the last word in this ...

regards Rainer

Hi Rainer
The buttons reversal are done. On the original Gemini hand controller you had a function to be able to reverse the RA buttons, and a separate function to Reverse the Dec buttons. On the original 4 button controller that came with the Gemini 1 units, (the ones with the displays in the Gemini units them self), had slide switched to reverse the RA and DEC buttons. That is what Ren??? is trying to provide here. He is trying to make the Gemini 2 at least provide all the functions of the Gemini 1, plus some better connectivity and capabilities.
I dough that you will ever see it where the hand controller can be rotated, at least not in any version one number of the Gemini 2 firmware.

A direct quote from Ren???
"The HC does not have an orientation sensor, maybe future ones, so this
would need other checkboxes.
Rotating the screen is not trivial, so far I got it running only
partially although I spent quite a lot of time on it. I wish I had a
graphics processor that could be commanded to simply rotate the screen,
but I have to program every pixel and this needs changes to many basic
graphics routines. Not impossible, but a feature for version 2."

Tom Hilton

Hi,

Well looks like I was misunderstood again :-)

I do not want that the screen rotates. I already have an iPod Touch and an iPad and those are enough rotating screens :-)

I am talking about the rotation of the button functions.

RA on the vertical and DEC on the horizontal.

I am praying that my Gemini I units do not fry :-)

regards Rainer

Hi Rainer
No I completely understood you. I was just trying to say that Ren??? is trying to provide the same functionally that was in the Gemini 1. Switching the DEC and RA buttons with each other was never an option considered as far as I know.

Tom Hilton

PS
The other reason I went into detail, is that keeping up with one set of keypads in real time is hard enough, but the possibility of having to keep up with 3 sets key pads in parallel is no small trick. I bet Ren??? is very glad that humans don't have 3 hands.:-D Push buttons are not trivial coding because of the switch bounce that every one of them have. I would think that Graphics touch screens process similar problems also. I also know that there is no hardware key de-bounce circuity in the graphics hand controller to assist. It all has to be done by the software. I know that Ren??? has spent several months trying to fix just the interactions that having 3 possible set of keypads has presented. He spent the last week alone making changes to the touch screens, giving users the capability to not only reverse the directions of the RA and DEC buttons on the front and rear separately, but added the capability to format the SDCard, add catalogs, and delete catalogs, upload firmware all from the hand controller. He also streamlined the upload process to make it faster. Unfortunately, this much change usually comes with a few bugs, that also have found and squashed. That's where the beta testers come in. We really all hate to have to tell Ren??? that something is not right. Every time that happens, something gets pushed back.
The Gemini 2 system is both more complex in the software aspect, but in many ways has less hardware to fail. The G1 had specially chips (5 of them) to drive the servos. The G2 only has three. Basically everything is handled by two ARM based processors, one it the main unit and one it the Hand controller. The servo movement and it's feed back in the G1 was handled by separate processors. This is not the case in the G2. The ARM in the main unit has to handle everything.:
RS-232 ports, USB ports, Ethernet Port and Web interface, Servo driving and feedback, Autoguider, Classic Hand controller, Feature port , Encoder port and of course all the modeling, PEC and interface to the Graphics processor. I think our maker every night for Ren???.

Tom Hilton