SoundStepper

Features

• Controls up to 4 motors (RA, Dec, focuser and field derotator) of a equatorial or alt-azimuth-mounted telescope
• Controls any type of equatorial-mounted telescopes with step motors. Manual-pointing mounts (ex: barndoor, poncet platforms, "polar axis", threaded-rod driven mounts), "meridian-flip" mounts (ex: GEM or cross-axis), and "no-meridian-flip" mounts (ex: Fork, yoke, horseshoe, split-ring), and beginning from 5.0 beta version, alt-azimuth mounts too
• Can "sync" and "go-to" manual-pointing mounts, making faint objects easier to find (manually center scope on a star, find the star in Cartes du Ciel, right-button, "sync", right-button on faint object, "go-to")
• Using analog control, SoundStepper drive step motors with quietness, smoothness and linearity. With adjustable linearity, the typical wobbling is 1/20 of step. Like microstep controllers, it can put the motors in any position between step positions
• In addition to the analog control option, SoundStepper is also capable to control commercial "pulse/direction" microstepping drivers
• No PICs, no micro soldering on small SMDs, no EPROMs. SoundStepper uses cheap USB-AUDIO devices to drive steppers, through a simple (SUGGESTED) analog current controller, or standard "pulse/direction" drivers
• No MS-DOS dedicated computers. SoundStepper does realtime control sharing the computer with planetarium, photo/video capture and others applications, in Windows. It take advantage of the audio devices buffering and autonomous playing
• Built-in PEC and NPEC (periodic and non-periodic error correction systems). With NPEC, the entire threaded rod can be "trained", enabling the use of cheap thread rods, and the "thread rod/nut/arm" system (like "Astrotrac")
• Main screen with keyboard arrows "control box" (four speeds: slew, find, center and guiding), go-to, flip, park/unpark, and focuser/rotator controls
• Permit save many defined positions of focuser, according eyepiece, camera, barlow and filter being used
• LX200 command interface compatibility, enabling the interoperability with Meade-compatible software, through virtual serial-TCP redirector. The TCP/IP interface enable control the scope from a remote computer
• Configuration screen with many controls, to match SoundStepper with your motors and mount
• Autosave and autorecover last telescope and motor positions (crash recover)
• Joystick interface: You can control the telescope with a standard joystick, wired or wireless.
• Field derotation for alt-azimuth mounts
• Backlash compensation
• Portable: You can run SoundStepper from any external HD or Pen-drive. No installation procedure is required
• Certified from Windows XP to Windows 10, including Vista, 7 and 8.1 versions, both 32 and 64-bit
• Native ASCOM driver for Telescope and Focuser

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