Help using stellarium installed on a mac to drive a scope

Hi All, Tearing out the last few remaining strands of hair trying to use Stellarium, which is installed on my mac air, to drive a celestron 8se. Got a serial USB converter cable which adapes the RS232 cable supplied with the socpe and installed same. But no matter what I try I cannot get the mac to talk to the scope. The issue seems to be when you go into configuring the scope details in stellarium, under port it comes up with "/dev/". I have identified the mac designation for each of the ports as 0x24 and 0x26 but adding these to the "/dev/" prompt makes no difference! Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Hi Decco,

When I plug the USB to serial cable into my MacBook, and type "ls /dev/*" in a terminal window, it gives the name of the relevant port as "/dev/tty.usbserial-FTDFZVMK". You should get a similar result if the USB to serial driver is installed correctly. I haven't tried controlling my mount, a CG5, using Stellarium recently, but in the past it worked fine once I had pasted the port name into the plugin in Stellarium. Your issue may be unrelated, but I hope that may help.

Mike

Hi Mike, thanks for that, apologies in advance if this is a stupid question, when you say a "terminal window", what / where exactly is this? In the telescope setup section in stellarium the only dialogue window is the serial port window which already has "/dev/" in it and will not allow me to input "Is/dev/*".
Thanks in advance
Declan

Hi Declan,

Not a stupid question at all, the only reason I know this is that it took me quite a while to figure it out myself. Terminal is an application on your Mac that allows access to some of the stuff 'under the hood', so to speak. You will find it in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. Double click to open it and after a moment you will get a prompt ending with a $ sign. Type the "ls /dev/*" command (without the quotes) and scroll through the list that will then be displayed to find the address of your serial port (the USB to serial cable must be connected at the time). You should then be able to type that address into the dialog in Stellarium that you refer to. I hope that is clearer, please post again if it doesn't work out.

Mike

SUCCESS!! Thanks Mike, mac is now talking to the scope and getting it to orientate to a specified object. Only for your your directions above I would never have found where to look for 'terminal'.

Thanks again

Declan

Excellent! I love the convenience of controlling the scope using a laptop. Keep us informed of your progress; it's always great to read observing reports.

Mike