First off, that sounds like a wonderful, fun application!

Anyway, you might want to look at Dolphin Smalltalk.  Don't get me wrong,
Squeak is way-cool... but, Dolphin has the best Windows support I've ever
seen.  If the library includes COM components, Dolphin should wrap them
pretty much automagically for you.  If not, DLLs wrap nicely as well. It's
not free, (actually, the last version IS free, but doesn't have as nice COM
support), but it is cheap, and very very nice.  You should check it out at:
http://www.object-arts.com

That doesn't mean you would be forced to do everything in Dolphin, even if
you decided to go with it to drive the control library.  You could write a
simple app in Dolphin which runs the control software.  You could then talk
to the app from your main, Squeak-based app via sockets.  I like the idea of
different flavors of Smalltalk working together, each one with its own
strong points...

Just a thought,

Jerry Bell
jdbell at fareselaw.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Fisher [mailto:kgf at golden.net]
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 1:18 PM
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: CCD data acquisition & Squeak


Hi All:

I've been kicking around a larger-scale project in my head for some time
now and I'm beginning to set some ideas to paper.

I'm an amateur astronomer and one of my favourite sports is CCD
astrophotography.  I use SBIG (www.sbig.com) CCD cameras, which is
controlled by their windows-only CCD control software..it's a decent
package that does the acquisition, tracking and some rudimentary
image processing.

I've also been a long-time user and fan of XEphem, the faithful X11
sky mapper (http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/index.html).

Sadly, my two key apps are seperated by OS. :(  (And no, WINE won't
cut the mustard for intensive parallel port access)

So, what I've been thinking is, "Gee, it sure would be nice to have
the functionality of both rolled into one...even better, doing it all
in Smalltalk!"  I've been thinking of creating a nice Squeak-based app
to control both data acquisition and to give me some nice sky maps.  I'm
only kicking around the idea right now, trying to find out how feasable
it is. :)

At any rate, there are two questions that I've got, all squeak-related:

1) Is there any way to access the parallel port in Squeak?  I notice that
there is a nice class for Serial access, but I couldn't find one for
parallel access.  Most SBIG cameras (mine included) are controlled via
parallel port.  For the more elaborate cameras the Serial port is used
as well to control automatic guiding hardware.

2) Lamentably, the SBIG library is closed-source.  However, it is available
for free and you can link whatever you want against it.  What is the best
way to access a native library from Squeak...FFI or by a custom pluggable
primitive?  It is a static library, FWIW.  I understand from the SWiki
that the FFI has it's "risks" associated with it. :)

Actually now that I think about it, the SBIG library functions all access
the parallel port directly...hmm.  Still, I'd be interested in knowing how
to drive the parallel port from Squeak.

Thanks for any advice...