Best firmware for Audiostar

[Piet Le Roux]

I have two meade Audiostar controllers that I use with a pair of 8" Lx90ACF's. For the last year I have been using the A17F version with a StarGPS patch. Recently I wanted to use a ST4 port that connects via a APM Dongle. The A17F firmware could not detect the dongle even if I selected all the patch options for APM909, I thought that the dongle must be faulty but could find no fault on its board: 5V regulator and oscillator were fine. Recently Meade issued new firmware to solve the GPS problem on some models and I downloaded version A4S4 onto my Audiostar even though I had no problems with my GPS on the LX90. When I plugged in the dongle, with the new firmware, it was detected but now the firmware was not patched.

I use the StarGPS patch for the following reasons :
I like writing my own tours or modify northern hemisphere tours for the southern hemisphere and the only way to download tours to a Audiostar controller successfully is via the MyScope app and for that you have to use patched firmware. It is also a lot faster to download and edit user data.
With patched firmware you can read the values of your motor calibration and drive training and then you can download these values to a spare controller to be used with a particular scope without having to do a motor calibration or drive training.

StarGPS has now brought out a patch for the A4S4 firmware so now my dongle works and I have patched firmware!

The patch gives you the following options:

GPS :
1) GPS Setup
2) Status display pause
3) Location display pause
4) Skip Simple Align
Bug Fixes:
1) Fix Drive Train / Cal Sensor Resets
2) Fix :EQ function
3) Fix :ES function
4) Fix :ED format
5) Fix No RA Card Message
6) Fix Tracking Rate writes
7) Fix MS below horizon slews
8) Fix Hbx FloatEdit
9) Fix :l# reboot via Park
10) Fix Help Hyperlinks
11) Fix Target RA/Dec on boot
Enhancements:
1) Skip Simple Tour
2) PEC Editor Hook
3) Clear Park Vars on Std Boot
4) Edit Train Drive
5) Edit Min Elevation
6) Increase Str ToFloat Precition
7) Increase Hbx Float Precition
8) Allow simple Hot plugging of APM909
9) Remove Encoder Flogging
10) AUX Enhance

I am not sure what all of them does but I know if you don't have a StarGPS dont't select the first 3 options . The StatPatch app does give explanations but I am not sure what all of them means.

I wonder if someone could give us more info on the selections of patch options.

[Piet Le Roux]

Weather here has been awful...so I have been spending time writing and modifying some Autostar/audiostar tours. Tom Carlson wrote two tours for the Scorpius and Sagittarius constellations in 2000 nearly 20 years ago!
I took them and did some mods, edited some stuff and developed a basic template for writing tours for constellations with outreach work in mind. I then wrote two more tours for Orion and Carina, The problem with the ordinals were that if you selected a tour of a constellation that is not visible it would still display the text but your scope would not move. The first time this happened I thought my scope has packed up. I added a little routine that checks first and then warns you if its below the horizon, else it just does the tour. Here is the four tours but they are very Southern Hemisphere orientated!

Tours.zip

(3.89 KiB) Downloaded 151 times

[Lady Fraktor]

Thank you for the effort for the Meade mounts!