SBIG's STV CCD autoguider

I have written a Linux GTK app to control the SBIG STV autoguider for use with our Optical Polarimeter on PRL's 1.2m Telescope at Gurushikhar.
Present version (screenshot below) is designed to emulate the hardware control panel keys of the STV completely. It includes a real-time display of the STV's 2x24 status display. Downloading / display of images are not yet supported (no requirements as yet since we make use of the real-time video output from the STV box)

Screenshot!

Interface designed using Glade

Software developed using Anjuta

Binary

Option tar.gz file: Compiled on RedHat Linux 7.3 http tar.gz file (Just 16KB in size!)
This binary works on SuSE 7.0 and RedHat 9 as well. So it should work on any gtk 1.2 system.
Option binary .rpm file: Compiled on RedHat Linux 7.3 stvremote-0.4-1.i386.rpm (About 40K)
This package includes led-fixed fonts (extracted from the xawtv package). Works on all post 7.0 RedHat versions. I could not install it on SuSE 7.0, but it should work on the newer SuSE releases.

Installation instructions

For the .tar.gz file :

Download above .tar.gz file to local disk
As root do:
cd / ; tar -xvzf complete_path_to_tar.gz_file

This will install two files:

/usr/local/bin/stv
/etc/X11/app-defaults/stvremoterc

For the .rpm file:

get the rpm file and then
As root execute the following:
rpm -Uvh stvremote-0.4-1.i386.rpm

Usage :

Execute the program by calling 'stv' from the command line. It can take one command line option -p /path/to_serial_port_device. But this can be set via settings menu option also once the gui is running.

To test the binary without the hardware connected you can try this:

stv -p /dev/null

Before going further, make sure that the STV hardware is set at communication speed of 115K baud rate. This is presently hardcoded in the program but if there is sufficient need (or if someone can contribute code!) options to change the baud rate could be added.

Now if you have the "led fixed" fonts installed properly (this should be the case if you took the rpm file) then you should be able to get a screen quite similar to the screenshot above. Else you'll get the status display in red coloured default font.

The program can be run as non-root user. Just make sure that the serial port device file has read write permission enabled.

This software released under the GPL.

Source code

If you would like to check out the source code and help with adding features, send me email : gshashikiran AT linuxmail DOT org