[RESOLVED] Help reading pixels

[christos57]

Hi
Thank you for taking the time to read my post

I am very new to vb net so please be gentle with me

I have recently downloaded 2008 express and found it be be very easy to use for the most part now for my problem

I own a low end telescope 5 inch Newtonian and ever time I try to focus it it takes about 3 seconds to stop shaking so I decided to build a focuser with a stepping motor easy then I decided to interface this into my laptop with the aid of vb.net 208 again not to hard so I built an interface that either manually send a pulse to drive the motor 1 step (1.8 degrees) or half step (0.9 degrees)
and an auto mode that with the use of a slide bar I select an amount of steps the motor will drive, the direction of the drive and weather it is full or half steps. Then I added the input from my modified webcam so I can view the image on the same form all not to hard.

Now what I want to do is
1. to view the image
2. select a part of the image
3. check the difference between the 1 pixel and the 4 pixels around it to determine if there is a great variance between then then move onto the next pixel
4. store the greatest variance in a variable
5. move the stepper 1 more step and repeat steps 1 through 4 until the best focus is obtained

any suggestions would be great or ideas on an easier approch

thanks in advance
christos