astroberry-piface

Astroberry PiFace provides a set of INDI drivers for PiFace addon boards to Raspberry Pi:

• PiFace Relay Plus,
• PiFace Motor Extra,

The project provides INDI drivers using above addons:

• PiFace Relay (indi support for 4 relays 20V/1A with status LEDs, with Motor Extra supports 2 DC or stepper motors),
• PiFace Focuser (indi focuser providing absolute and relative position control),

Major changes

• Starting from version 2.2:
  • 2 steppers are available and selectable
• Starting from version 2.1:
  • libmcp23s17 is linked statically
  • multiple steppers and relays are not supported
• Starting from version 2.0.2:
  • libmcp23s17 is included as a submodule so you don't have to install it separately
• Starting from version 2.0.1:
  • driver supports up to 8 relays (requires 2 PiFace Relay Plus addon modules) and 2 stepper focusers
  • PiFace Control and Display driver (indi_piface_cad) was moved to separate project

So what's the relation between Astroberry PiFace and Astroberry project?

Astroberry PiFace is a successor of Astroberry project. Astroberry project was based on custom addon board, which required understanding of electronics and soldering skills to build. The new project was created to make things easier and let anybody use Raspberry Pi as a INDI server with support to all of these nice features of PiFace addon boards. Astroberry PiFace is based on hardware already available on market, so all you need is to put the tiles together, grab astroberry-piface software and you're ready to go.

How to start?

First, you need to download and install INDI server and libraries. See INDI site for more details. In most cases it's enough to run:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libindi1

Second, download and install astroberry-piface.

Compiling from source:

sudo apt-get install libindi-dev
git clone https://github.com/rkaczorek/astroberry-piface.git
cd astroberry-piface
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

How to use it?

Start your INDI server with Astroberry PiFace drivers:

indiserver -l /var/log/indi -f /var/run/indi -p 7624 indi_piface_relay indi_piface_focuser

Start KStars with Ekos, connect to your INDI server and enjoy!

NOTE: PiFace Relay Plus hardware address MUST be set to 000 for the first addon module and 001 for the second addon module. To do it you need to set JP1, JP2 and JP3 to 1-2 to set hardware address to 000 and JP1 to 2-3 and JP2, JP3 to 1-2 to set hardware address to 001. See PiFace Relay Plus documentation for details.