Re: [Nova-developer] Hello again

[Juan C. R. F. <jc...@ca...>]

Hello Gord, I'm happy to have your news.

I lament the problems of your company and on the other hand I am glad for the recent
birth of your son last October.  I have had also a baby last friday, in my country, when a
baby comes to the world, one says that "it comes with a bread underneath the arm" to
indicate that it is a signal that the things are going to improve. My better desires for you
and your family.

Speaking of another thing, from some time ago the drivers of spiderd have been
implemented as dynamically  loadable modules, reason why there will not be
problems to integrate your modules.

I recommend you to begin directly with spiderd, using the driver for dsws (Dallas
Semiconductor Weather Station) just finished, as an example or skeleton for your
own driver, you must take a moment to revise this code because this driver has a
special feature (it sends periodically weather data on demand). A standard driver
has four fundamental functions, handler_startup() and handler_shutdown() to start
and stop a service (the name is obvious), and handler_output() to process the
received commands and send request to the device (the telescope, the ccd, etc.)
and to receive the answer from the device and sent it back to the client. the last api
is the handler_input() whose purpose is to handle any message originated in the device,
without a previous request, and send back to the client wich handles it via the unsolicited
message callback. Why this api?, because some devices could send unsolicited messages,
i.e. a telescope could send periodically its position while in goto mode, or if you made manual
modifications to the actual position to actualize the client's data. If you think about this you will
find more examples..

If you do not want to use spiderd at this moment, I recommend you that you use at least the
functions from the libspider library, whose documentation you will be able to find in the doc
directory, in AbiWord format, and some diagrams to explain the message system. For the
serial port you can use the files serport.c and serport.h.

At the moment I am working on the ULT and the shipment of multiple answer messages to the
client. When this part finishes I have plans to work on the driver for the LX200, reason why your
previous work with the driver of autostar will be a great aid.

Do not doubt to put in contact with me if you have some problem.

Cheers
Juan Carlos