I dedicated some time today to accomplish two things:
1) Update the Handset and Motor software on my Celestron 127SLT using my iMac.
2) Control my Celestron 127SLT using my Mac.
If you done any googling for this task you may reach the same conclusion that it’s not easy getting this ‘scope working with a Mac, unless you want to fork out on some virtualisation software and a copy of Windows, but after several methods I have been successful. This is how I did it.
I’ve done this on an iMac and a Macbook Air, both running Mac OSX Lion 10.7.2.
You will need a USB to serial adapter, and a serial cable for the ‘scope. The latter I purchased from here.
When I plug the USB to serial adapter into to my iMac, the system info tells me it has a Prolific chipset.
This is important, you need to make a note of the Product ID and Vendor ID, in my case this is 2303 and 067b. We’ll need this later.
Now, go ahead and plug your USB to serial adapter into your Mac, your Celestron cable into the adapter, and the remaining end into the port at the bottom of your ‘scopes handset. After lots of messing around, I realised that this is always where we connect, we do NOT use the port labelled AUX on the mount itself. I guess this is for a GPS module.
Now download and install the latest Prolific driver for Mac by going to http://www.prolific.com.tw click on the Support section and you will be prompted to login; just use “GUEST” as the Account and Password. Now click through to http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/supportDownload.aspx?FileType=56&FileID=133&pcid=85&Page=0 and scrolling down you will see the link for the Mac drivers. The filename is md_PL2303_MacOSX10.6_dmg_v1.4.0.zip
When downloaded unzip it (by double-clicking in Finder), find the resulting directory and double-click the .dmg file to install as normal. When complete, reboot.
When done, we need to use a terminal session to sudo vi to edit the drivers Info.Plist file as follows:-
$ cd /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/Contents/
$ sudo vi Info.plist
You’ll be prompted to enter your admin password, do this and find the section that looks like this…
And replace the integers for idProduct and idVendor for the values we noted earlier.
If you are using OS X Mountain Lion, you need to do some extra work for some reason. Download a third party kernel extension from http://www.xbsd.nl/pub/osx-pl2303.kext.tgz and double-click it in the Finder to extract it. Now start a terminal session and run the following (it will ask for you admin password on the first command) :
- sudo cp -R ~/Downloads/osx-pl2303.kext /System/Library/Extensions
- sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/Extensions/osx-pl2303.kext
- sudo chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/osx-pl2303.kext
- sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/osx-pl2303.kext
- sudo kextcache -system-cache
Now download and install Playonmac. This will enable us to be able to install and run the Windows-based update software that is provided by Celestron. It downloads as a .dmg file, so when done install as you normally do a Mac application by dragging the icon to the Applications folder…
The Handset update I used is here, and the Motor control update I used is here. Go ahead and download these. Once downloaded (mine go to my Downloads folder), unzip them and you’ll have two .exe files.
In your Finder application, double-click the first .exe file (I’m doing the HCupdate one first) and it should automatically call the PlayOnMac application, and since it’s the first time we’ve run it, it’ll show…
Go ahead and click Open and you’ll see the PlayOnMac window, following by the first page of the Automatic installation wizard.
Click Next and the application will likely tell you the Microsoft fonts aren’t installed…
Click Next, agree to the license, and it will dutifully download them.
When done, click Next and the app will do configuration stuff..
Click Next again, and this time it will begin the install of the Window .exe we clicked on. Click Next, and name the program a name…again it will configure stuff, and then you’ll get the standard Windows install program. I won’t bore you with all that markarky, just accept the defaults.
Now we define a shortcut for what we have just installed. As below, select the icon, then click Next. It will then ask for another name, so I used “HCupdate” again. It then appears to have not worked, returning to the previous shortcut window, but just choose “I don’t want another shortcut” the second time and click Next.
When we’re finished we’ll see an icon for our app in PlayOnMac…
Nearly there. Before this application will work however, we need to configure it to use the device port that the Mac uses for the USB to serial adapter we plugged in earlier. On my Mac that appears as /dev/tty.usbserial but of course Windows uses comm ports (e.g. com1, com2, etc).
In the PlayOnMac app, click the Configure icon, then click the HCupdate icon, and the Miscellaneous tab. You should see the button “Open a shell”. Go ahead and click this fella. Now do the following as you see in the next screenshot…
You can close this window by typing “exit” then hitting ENTER. Close the Configuration window. Back at the main PlayOnMac window we can now highlight the HCupdate icon and click the Run icon to start it up. Follow the instructions to download and install the lastest firmware to your Handset. You have to start the mount whilst pressing a specific key combination in order for the handset to accept the firmware update. The HCupdate program will tell you how to do this.
Repeat for the MCupdate executable, and hey presto, task 1 in my list is done.
The photo above shows the handset whilst the MCupdate is updating the Motor control firmware (there are actually two updates it does for the mount).
We can use PlayOnMac in the same way to install the Celestron NexRemote program, and the excellent utilities at http://www.nexstarsite.com/ like the Nexstar Observation List and low-and-behold, task 2 is done too 🙂
Having played around with various Mac applications, so far I’ve found Astroplanner to be the one I feel I will use the most. It can be used to plan your observing, and set and control your telescope. In theory, and I will confirm this when I get a good night, having told it my setup and after aligning the ‘scope, it should show me what I should see in my eyepiece and slew the ‘scope to the object and track it. 🙂
