Please note that, as of 2011, I no longer support the Intelliscope
driver.
I recommend David Ek's driver for those who may be interested.
David's driver may be found here:
ASCOM Driver for EkBox and Other Interfaces
ASCOM Intelliscope Driver Help File, March 2010
This file contains preliminary information about the current Imaginova
driver for Orion Intelliscope. This driver should work with the following
Digital Setting Circles (DSC): Celestron Advanced Astromaster, David Chandler
Co. Deep Space Navigator, Discovery Digital Setting Circles, Grecner Navigator,
JMI NGCMAX, Lumicon Sky Vector, Mountain Instruments Star Pilot, Orion Sky
Wizard 3, and TeleVue Sky Tour, as well as BBox, Ouranos, MicroGuider III and V,
and other similar units.
The Orion Intelliscope driver has been developed by Imaginova. It is
based on an earlier ASCOM driver written by Dave Ek for his DSC interface.
Start by installing the latest
ASCOM 5 platform. Next, be sure to install any platform updates that are
available. At present this would be the 5.5.1 update. After installing the
platform, please install this driver by way of the stand-alone exe installer
Intelliscope Setup.exe
Intelliscope stand-alone driver for ASCOM 5 platform
Be sure to enter your Comm port and encoder resolutions under driver
properties setup screen. Different encoder resolutions are used on various
telescopes, common values include 2048, 4000, 8000, and 10,000 (older DSCs may
not handle 10,000 tic encoders). The encoder resolution for Intelliscope is
9216. You will not be able to connect to your telescope until you have specified
non-zero encoder resolution and set the correct Comm port values.
You do not need to perform any DSC stand-alone alignment steps with your
DSC hardware, because the DSC only sends raw encoder values to your serial port.
You can skip the alignment star process on the DSC, and just follow the steps
from the ASCOM driver.
On some DSC, you may need to set the vertical or horizontal position of
the telescope and use the enter key on your DSC so that encoder readings will be
sent for both Alt/Dec and Az/RA. If your tracking is bad, check your encoder
values and try the driver setup screen option to reverse RA/AZ axis.
Thanks, Peter Eschman