RoscoeD
My feeling is that they severely lack manpower to implement and test new features. Which in my opinion (it is only mine, they probably disagree) has an easy solution: open the software and let the community contribute the development. As easy as opening a github with the software, select an appropriate license, make some effort to document the code and invite people to fork and contribute to it through issues and pull requests. I am pretty sure custom parking, limits on the CAA rotation, better implementation of the align-focus-capture 'workflow' [1], flat panel support, even 3rd party hardware support, and other multiple things would be a breeze to implement for many of us.
Being protective about the software might have made sense commercially in the past to stop people from copying you, but it is 2026 and there is already stellavita, stellarmate, PINS, and now Skywatcher is going to release their own suite. PINS in particular once it is polished would be a no brainer, with the NINA code base behind and a much more advance ecosystem than ASIAIR can even dream of. The question is not if they will succeed over asiair, the question is when.
Opening the software now in my opinion would make a lot of sense to accelerate its development, polish the code and make it competitive against PINS and the others. If ZWO does not open it, fine, but I am afraid the asiair ecosystem will fall at some point and many of us will just migrate to other more promising suites instead of waiting for the needed fixes to come. Come on @"PMTeam@ZWO you have a gold opportunity to do the right thing here, just discuss it within your team and consider it 🙂 .
[1] About this. I think the workflow in asiair is not the ideal one. I think it would be much much better for the plan mode to operate in the following order:
- Rough blind pointing to the target.
- Autoguide calibration (optional)
- Autofocus run (optional)
- Centering of the target.
- Capture.
- After a few captures, dither (optionally) and/or checking for rough centering and triggering re-centering if required (optionally).
Centering the target should be the last thing, particularly after autoguide calibration since on mounts with backlash the autoguide calibration may (and actually will) move the frame away from the intended pointing.
