[amsat-bb] FoxDelta ST2-0417 USB setup help

[Charles Reiche]

Hi Jim,

What about opening the com port in a serial terminal program and sending
and receiving commands and feedback from the interface?
If you built your interface, make sure the voltage regulator is soldered in
correctly and everything is running at 5V. I managed to have my regulator
in backwards and everything including the USB chip was running at about 9V.
After I fixed the regulator, I had to replace the USB chip before things
behaved correctly. Maybe the interface only has communications in one
direction?

I never had any luck with connection to Satpc32, but PSTRotator works great
and can be controlled by Satpc32 over DDE.


Charlie
N3CRT


On Wed, Jul 8, 2020, 10:29 PM Jim Walls via AMSAT-BB <amsat-bb at amsat.org>
wrote:

> I recently bought a FoxDelta ST2-0417 USB rotor interface for my Yaesu
> G-5500 rotor.  I have the ST-2 communicating with the rotor just fine.
> I can see the azimuth and elevation readout and using the ST2
> pushbuttons, I can control both just fine.   However, I can't get it to
> communicate properly with my computer.  I am running a Dell desktop
> under Windows 10 and have installed the CH360G driver.  The ST2 shows as
> COM8 according the the device manager.  If I unplug the USB cable, the
> Device Manager confirms that COM8 goes away and when I plug the cable
> back in, COM8 returns.  I initially was trying to use Nova for Windows
> (which I have used for 20+ years).  I tried every software interface
> setting (using COM8) and the best I could get a couple weeks ago was
> Azimuth display and control (no elevation display, but it appeared that
> it tried to control elevation), but can't manage to replicate that
> today. Everything shows either 0.0 / 0.0 or ---- / ---- for the rotor
> pointing in Nova.
> Somewhat out of desperation, I downloaded SatPC32 and can't even get
> that far.  As far as I can tell, every rotor type is expecting a
> parallel port interface.  Keep in mind that I have never seen SatPC32
> until an hour ago, so that may be my issue.
>
> My preference would be to use Nova for Windows, but if that can't be
> made to work, I CAN switch over to SatPC32.  In either case, the
> software will be used exclusively for rotor control and not doppler
> correction (not using a radio that supports that).
>
>
> Do you have any suggestions?
>
> --
> 73
> -------------------------------------
> Jim Walls - K6CCC
> jim at k6ccc.org
> Ofc:  818-548-4804
> http://members.dslextreme.com/users/k6ccc/
> AMSAT Member 32537 - WSWSS Member 395
>
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