Right OK thats really good to know. Hopefully things will work once the driver is updated. Once it is working then hopefully I can answer my first question for myself.
Thanks a lot for the response, that was really helpful!
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Hi,
I have spent the last few days trying to set up an AAG Cloud Watcher (AAG_CW) unit on Ubuntu 20.04 for my remote autonomous observatory.
I have hit a few brick walls and I am currently uncertain as to how to proceed. From what I have seen on this forum, there are some very knowledgeable here. I therefore thought that it would be sensible to make a post describing what I am trying to do, just in case anyone is easily able to point to what I am doing wrong and save me days/weeks of pain!
My Objective
The observatory that I am building is designed to be fully autonomous. It therefore requires a way of sensing the local weather to determine when to collect observations. I bought the AAG_CW to perform this task, mostly because they indicated on their website that Linux drivers were available. All I need it to do is continually update a local .txt file with the latest sensor data which can then be read by the code that handles the system automation.
I have tested the hardware in Windows 10, using the manufacturer-provided software, and with the weather sensor connected to an RS232 serial port. Everything works as expected and the weather sensor data is read and saved locally.
The Problem
The first thing I tried was using the AAG Cloud Watcher drivers (www.indilib.org/weather/aag-cloud-watcher.html).
This may be where I have made my first mistake. I was expecting that this would be some kind of command line interface with the AAG_CW, that would allow me to query the current sensor data.
As an aside, I also tried running the "aagcloudwatcher_test" command from the terminal. I receive a "Cloudwatcher NOT present" response. Looking at the code on GitHub (my experience with c++ is extremely limited) it appears that it is hard-coded to only look at port /dev/ttyUSB0, whereas my sensor is plugged into port /dev/ttyS4 (an actual RS232 port).
This leads to my first question: Can the drivers available on this site be ran purely from the command line? Or are all of the drivers on this website only for facilitating communication between the hardware and some front-end GUI such as KStars? Additionally, is it a problem that is isnt plugged into the /dev/ttyUSB0 port?
(If the answer to this question is no, skip forward to the conclusion as I have failed at the first hurdle)
I decided to park this first issue and first see if I can get the AAG_CW to function in Ubuntu at all. I downloaded KStars and the required INDI libraries. In KStars I tried to load the AAG Cloud Watcher drivers from the Device Manager window but it immediately crashes with the following error message:
Driver indi_aagcloudwatcher: indi_aagcloudwatcher: symbol lookup error: indi_aagcloudwatcher: undefined symbol: _ZN4INDI10BaseDevice9getSwitchEPKc
[ERROR] getCloudWatcherAnswer read error: Timeout error
[ERROR] Can not get data from device