Client applications
Once you have drivers running, you need an application to control it.
The drivers have no direct user interface are designed to be only talked to through a network connection.
You can use a web browser to read data but a web browser will not let you send commands.
AlpacaPi includes stand alone client applications for the following devices.
- Camera
- Dome
- Filter Wheel
- Focuser
- Switch
As stated above, a client application needs to know what device to talk to.
You could specify the exact IP address and port if you know it, or use the discovery protocol.
One thing to note, the discovery protocol only works on your local subnet.
For most people this is fine, but if you want to control a REMOTE device, you will need to specify the IP and port.
The client would issue a discovery protocol query and look for the devices it knows how to talk to.
In this example we are running my camera Gui program. As you can see from the client dump above,
it has found a camera at IP 192.168.1.164 on port 6800.
It also noticed that there was a filter wheel on the same device.
This camera application is smart enough to know how to talk to both of them.
If a filter wheel does not exist, that interface is not displayed as in the 2nd image.
To build the client apps, you have to have opencv installed. (refer to the software installation documentation).
There are two versions of opencv that are currently supported, version 3.2.2 and before and after 3.2.2.
To build the camera client app:
>make cameracv4
or
>make camera
My focuser application is specifically designed to look exactly like the MoonLite NiteCrawler application.
As in the case of the camera and the filter wheel.
This app recognizes that there is both a focuser and a rotator on the same device.
It will also work with the normal MoonLite focuser controller that does not have the rotator.
The image on the right is for a focuser that does not have an integrated rotator.
Again, designed to look just like the MoonLite application.
