The Ek’s Files

Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a mapaholic.

Being an occasional backpacker, I use topographic maps both for planning hikes and camping trips, and for navigating on the trail. My map of choice, just like practically everyone else, is the 7.5-minute USGS quad. I obtained my first one of these back in the late 80’s, before the internet, and before it was feasible to store much map data electronically (can you say “40 MB hard drive”?). I think I ended up ordering it from someplace, and it came in the mail rolled up in a cardboard tube. I think I just about wet my pants when I first unrolled it. It was soooo cool! The level of detail on that map (1 inch = 2000 ft) was more than I’d ever experienced, and I could determine the latitude and longitude of anything on the map. It wasn’t long before I could smugly recite the coordinates of my house down to the arc second or so.

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I’ve been working over the past several weeks to update my ASCOM driver for my Digital Setting Circles project. My initial impetus for doing so was to make my existing driver fully compliant with the ASCOM standards, and also to add a “sync” capability that so many folks have requested. I also wanted to implement a “slewing” capability (basically just feedback as you push your telescope tube toward a target, like what you can do with my stand-alone DSC software) and make it easier to execute the alignment process. Finally, I’d like to make the driver compatible with other devices that use the BBox protocol, include the Orion Intelliscope.

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