Simply put: Meade has never been 'open' with their communication protocol... The only way we've been able to effectively communicate with Meade heads was to hack the firmware on the 497 hand controller so it could work for our purposes. This was effectively blocked when Meade
updated the chipset on the 497(eg) controller making it almost impossible to upload a modified firmware.
At this point you would literally have to sniff out and reverse engineer the communication between the handset and the head breaking it down one hex at a time. Extremely tedious work.
Why not just go with Orion?

The communication protocol is well documented:
http://www.gigapixel.nu/info_project.php