Skip to content

v0.5.0

Pre-release
Pre-release

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@DanielVanNoord DanielVanNoord released this 19 Oct 20:29
· 8 commits to main since this release
v0.5.0
05d6078

Release v0.5.0 of the ASCOM Alpaca Simulators project! Primary improvements include changes to several simulated devices and improved testing for Alpaca calls. This release contains features for the next major release of the OmniSim with significant improvements for several devices.

Major Change Summary

Dome, FilterWheel, Focuser, Rotator, and Safety Monitor have been completely rewritten to used a new shared driver back end. This allows easy reuse of a lot of common driver code. For example async connects now take a little time to complete, allowing async connect code to be better tested. Each of these devices now support a multiple simulations. The code for these simulated devices has been significantly cleaned up as well.

The updated devices offer a settable interface version. This enables or disables features that are available for each of the released interface versions. This allows clients to test behavior against historical versions of ASCOM devices.

They also support a JSON based API to change simulation settings for each of the updated devices. The OmniSim Swagger page now includes the specification for this API (exact commands are subject to change).

Each of the updated devices now supports independent log levels and generates a device specific log, separate from the main OmniSim log.

After this version has been tested for a while the other device types will receive the same updates.

The OmniSim generated swagger documentation has been greatly improved.

For Windows builds the OmniSim now supports a tray icon to allow the console to be shown or hidden and the web UI to be launched.

Simulation changes

  1. Major changes to Dome, FilterWheel, Focuser, Rotator, and Safety Monitor
  2. Several bug and function enhancements
  3. Safety Monitor - Throws not connected on IsSafe
  4. UI now displays all switches
  5. Camera - Improvements to sensor FOV
  6. Observing Conditions - Dew point changed to Celsius

General Improvements

  1. Fixed several UI issues and unhappy paths.
  2. Docker issues have been fixed.
  3. New command line argument --show-browser will tell the OmniSim to open the browser to the main page, this can be called at start or by calling the main OmniSim binary while a copy is already running.
  4. System Tray on Windows allows the console to be shown or hidden and the web UI to be launched
  5. Settings now use invariant culture
  6. UI supports a dynamic number of devices

The binaries can be started directly or from the command line. Either way they can display a terminal for output / testing. These releases are simple zip / tar.xz files containing the output. For each the main binary is named ascom.alpaca.simulators.

Each OS dependent package was built as a Self Contained (does not require .Net 8.0 to be installed) and Trimmed (size reduced by removing unused platform code). All targets are Ready to Run AOT Compiled (whatever code can be fully compiled was).

This release includes Windows (x86 and amd64) as part of Platform 7, Linux (amd64, armhf, and aarch64), and MacOS (amd64 and arm64).

The zip that ends with .Net 8.0 is a release build that is much smaller but it requires .Net 8.0 to be installed on the system. It can be unzipped and started by calling "dotnet .\ascom.alpaca.simulators.dll" or by running the exe on Windows.

Linux builds also offer experimental AppImage packages, which have AppImage in the file name.

Assets 13
Loading