ScopeDriver Status Report (aka “The State of ScopeDriver Report”)

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UPDATE: 25 FEBRUARY 2010

We have cleared a major hurdle in the ScopeDriver refactoring — we have ScopeDriver working in-house after the re-write, and we're looking for any bugs related to the re-write. That means essentially stepping through the code line-by-line, which is time consuming, but we want things to work as well as possible before unleashing a new alpha to the world. ;-)

In the upcoming alpha, we will also incorporate a special Celestron test mode, which will make it easier for Celestron testers to perform a quick test and send us the results. With all of the different protocols and command permutations among various Celestron models and versions, this should make it much easier to sort out the differences and implement them in a timely manner.

We appreciate your patience and the many messages we have received regarding ScopeDriver development!

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We have recently been devoting development time to ScopeDriver, and we are nearly complete with the refactoring that will help us resume the ScopeDriver alpha series. We appreciate your patience, and the many e-mail messages we have received regarding ScopeDriver. We know ScopeDriver is important to you, as it is to us.

In the summer of 2009, we embarked on an ambitious and often-requested project: adding Celestron support to ScopeDriver for Macintosh and Windows. We encountered several obstacles that delayed the alpha series of ScopeDriver, and have received dozens of requests concerning our progress toward that goal. This page summarizes where we are now, and where we’re going with ScopeDriver’s development.

ScopeDriver Refactoring

“Refactoring” basically means that we are re-writing a lot of ScopeDriver’s telescope control code. We have added support for numerous telescope types over the years, and these transitions were always fairly painless from a development point of view. Once we got into the Celestron command set, we realized that Celestron incorporates a fundamentally different approach to telescope control. In order to make sure that ScopeDriver works reliably with these instruments, it became clear that it was not possible to simply modify ScopeDriver’s internal telescope control modules; it was instead necessary to substantially rewrite them. We didn't anticipate that being a problem, however, and much of the refactoring has already been completed.

Development at a Distance

Because various models of Celestron use very different command sets, and because we want to support all Celestron models commonly in use today, we are attempting to write support for all of these models. However, it is very time-consuming to develop these changes without having all of these models on-site for rapid testing. Instead, we relied on several very helpful and dedicated testers, posting or sending builds of ScopeDriver, gathering information from what did and did not work, then receiving that information back and making changes based on that information. This proved to be a very slow and sometimes painful process, and we understand that most people don’t have time to drop everything on a moment’s notice in order to test a new software build.

If we had the various Celestron models on-site, we could accomplish in hours what would take days or weeks to accomplish with this kind of back-and-forth development. The economy has affected us as it has affected many people worldwide, and we realized we would have to budget for the purchase of new or used Celestrons, and came up with a plan to borrow Celestrons from area astronomy clubs. As one might expect, it proved very difficult to obtain the required models through the clubs, as most clubs also operate on a shoestring budget, and individuals are understandably reluctant to part with their light buckets for even a short while.

We are making progress, however, in acquiring Celestron instruments via our own resources.

Snow Leopard Arrives

In the midst of all of this, Apple released version 10.6 of their great operating system (also known as “Snow Leopard”) which contained some changes that caused us, our compiler company, and our software associates some grief. Memory-related issues began to occur with two of our other popular titles — DarkAdapted and UTC Global Clock — which negatively impacted their functionality. Fortunately, ScopeDriver was not affected by these changes, and so the current release version works great with Snow Leopard.

But this did require not only a lot of code changes on our part, but also working extensively with our compiler company and another third-party developer tool company to quickly identify and solve the issues. The issues were finally resolved by all three parties a couple of months later. But this effectively put the ScopeDriver alpha program on hold, as our priority was to fix the products with problems first.

Server and Internal Program Issues

One of our programs (DarkAdapted) became so popular that it began to slow down our servers, overtop our bandwidth quotas, and cause other server issues. But that’s a good problem to have! We have added another server primarily to host DarkAdapted and its support files, and this required some rewrites to our in-house software that handles orders, serial number requests, mailing lists, and more. Of course, this has also consumed valuable development time.

ScopeDriver Development Resumes

As stated above, we have recently resumed ScopeDriver development, and we are nearly complete with the refactoring that will help us resume the ScopeDriver alpha series. And to reiterate: We appreciate your patience, and the many e-mail messages we have received regarding ScopeDriver. We know ScopeDriver is important to you, as it is to us. Clear Skies!

— Steve Hutson, ScopeDriver’s developer

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