ASCOM Sky Commander Driver v2.2.0, Information File, August 2013

This ASCOM driver is for the Sky Commander Digital Setting Circle (DSC) device.


This is a Telescope V1 specification driver, originally written by Douglas B. George. The Inno script and stand alone SkyCommander Setup.exe installer were produced by Peter Eschman, with Doug's permission and encouragement.

At present, this is an un-supported driver, so you are on your own. In testing, it works well, and reports the RA and Dec values from a Sky Commander DSC.

Modifications to the driver in May of 2013 were made by Peter Eschman. These changes were made to the driver so it would pass tests using Conform v6.0.0.49. Com port choices were increased from 1-8 to 1-16. The only remaining issue is that the current driver does not report Sidereal Time. This would need to be derived from the current site Longitude, and can not be read directly from the Sky Commander. This version of the driver should do correct position reports regardless of the Windows language setting for comma versus decimal delimiters used in formating numbers. The result of this work was driver v2.1.0

This driver was modified in August of 2013 by Peter Eschman. Changes were made to insure that the driver would handle cycling between connect/disconnect modes correctly. The result of this work was driver v2.2.0

Note: All USB to serial adapters do not work equally well. Some work with other utilities, but are not compatible with the way that ASCOM uses the serial port. ASCOM serial port access is based on the latest .NET techology. If you have problems, try using a high quality adapter, such as one from Keyspan.

This version of the driver will appear in the Add/Remove Programs list as:
ASCOM SkyCommander Telescope Driver
If you see an earlier ASCOM SkyCommander driver under Add/Remove Programs (Programs, Uninstall a program), which does not exactly match the way the current driver will appear, you may want to uninstall it before installing the current driver.

After installing the current ASCOM platform, please install this driver by way of the stand-alone exe installer:
Sky Commander stand-alone driver for ASCOM platform
After the driver is installed, please use the ASCOM chooser to select SkyCommander. After selecting SkyCommander, be sure to click on properties and set the Com port to the one you are using. This driver is limited to Com ports 1 through 16, so be sure any USB to serial adapter is configured as one of these Com port numbers.

Peter Eschman