First time out in ages last night and I had similar problems to Anand. It would get into the refresh cycle then after a few images it would start saying solver failed. It did this a couple of time thought it might be my new camera as it used to work (would have been some months ago so probably a different version of stellarmate) but the solve and slew process worked fine. No logs just thought it was my new setup and had other things to work out.

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By manually setting back to home position do you mean you release the clutches and rotate it back by hand? If so you don’t want/need to do that as there’s a tick box somewhere that parks the mount at the end of the polar alignment process which basically does that. You can also tell it to park in the mount control tab. Both methods will move it back home. All you need to do then is unpark (in the mount control tab) and tell it where you want to target, then once it’s stopped rotating use the alignment process to refine your pointing.

PS if you don’t unpark things just don’t appear to work which can be quite confusing.

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Is that every time phd2 takes an image by any chance?

I’ve run into a similar problem and was given a few suggestions which didn’t seem to have any impact and I ended up disabling the fits viewer.

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dmesg is a command you enter in a terminal. It’s mainly for tailing the kernels message output. If you run this and then plug in the focuser usb cable it will hopefully show the messages as the kernel loads up the driver.

Otherwise you can look at the various log files which live in /var/log. You will need to open a terminal cd to /var/log type ls -lrt to list the files in last modified time order and look for ones called something like boot.log or kern.log (there are various log files and I’m not entirely sure of the differences so you might have to look at a couple). Use something like vi (or editor of choice) and search for Celestron which should take you to the correct messages. I can’t confirm 100% as my setup is currently in pieces but it should be fairly obvious from what I remember. These lines should show which usb port is assigned. If it’s the one the indi driver is trying to use then keep looking through your log file to see if something else takes over that port as happened to me.


Another alternative is to use lsusb to list what ports are assigned to what, however you will most likely need to install the package usbutils. See www.thegeekdiary.com/lsusb-command-not-found/ for some details about this.

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dmesg is a command you enter in a terminal. It’s mainly for tailing the kernels message output. If you run this and then plug in the focuser usb cable it will hopefully show the messages as the kernel loads up the driver.

Otherwise you can look at the various log files which live in /var/log. You will need to open a terminal cd to /var/log type ls -lrt to list the files in last modified time order and look for ones called something like boot.log or kern.log (there are various log files and I’m not entirely sure of the differences so you might have to look at a couple). Use something like vi (or editor of choice) and search for Celestron which should take you to the correct messages. I can’t confirm 100% as my setup is currently in pieces but it should be fairly obvious from what I remember. These lines should show which usb port is assigned. If it’s the one the indi driver is trying to use then keep looking through your log file to see if something else takes over that port as happened to me.


Another alternative is to use lsusb to list what ports are assigned to what, however you will most likely need to install the package usbutils. See www.thegeekdiary.com/lsusb-command-not-found/ for some details about this.

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That’s the right area.

I’ve had a few problems with usb ports getting mixed up at times. I would suggest looking in the kernel logs (dmesg should show you what you need to see or go and look at the actual files). You should find the section where the focuser starts up and it will hopefully say which port it’s on. Then use that in the Connection tab.

I had problems due to a usb gps dongle that took over the port the focuser had been allocated. Eventually just decided the dongle wasn’t worth the effort. Got rid and things work fine now.

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I’ve got one of those, you have to do the initial calibration in the indi driver. It goes from one extreme to the other to work out the max and min values.

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Thanks Michael & Magnus, I will give those two suggestions a try.

Regards

Nigel

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I’ve noticed that if I have the fits viewer enabled then images from the guide camera get displayed.

I’m on a recent version of stellarmate having upgraded from astroberry (where I didn’t have this problem) and am using phd2.

Is there some config I need to do to stop the fits viewer receiving the guide images or is this a known problem or feature?

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Nigel Dunmore replied to the topic 'GPS date and time wrong' in the forum. 11 months ago

Hi

that command was from the astroberry setup scripts, you don’t need to type that in. Check the file /etc/chrony/chrony.conf to see if that line is there, also check that chrony is running using sudo systemctl status chrony (I believe that’s the correct systemctl command).

If chrony is configured and running then it should be picking up updates from gpsd using the shared memory interface. These updates will then enable it to correct the system time of the raspberry. This is all outside of ekos/kstars/indi. There are commands that can show whether the updates are being seen at least for ntp and I would expect for chrony (chrony and ntp do similar jobs it’s just one of those linux choice things ). Note if you are connecting the raspberry to a network with internet access it’s quite possible that chrony will get the date/time from an internet time server which is what my system does now. There are commands (again at least for ntp but I expect the same for chrony) that show which source it has decided to use as you can configure a priority to each source.

There’s a diagram somewhere in the astroberry faqs showing how the gps system hangs together I believe.

Regards

Nigel

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Nigel Dunmore replied to the topic 'GPS date and time wrong' in the forum. 12 months ago

Hi Lars

I think you can ignore what I was saying as I’ve checked the astroberry source and it configures chrony (which it uses in place of ntp) to get the date/time from the gps :-

# Set chrony to update time from GPS
if [ -e /etc/chrony/chrony.conf ] && [ -z "$(grep 'refclock SHM 0 offset 0.5 delay 0.2 refid GPS' /etc/chrony/chrony.conf)" ]; then
echo "refclock SHM 0 offset 0.5 delay 0.2 refid GPS" >> /etc/chrony/chrony.conf
fi

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Nigel Dunmore replied to the topic 'Focus is not good' in the forum. 12 months ago

Hy, John

I previously tweaked sep will have to have another go. I need to record a set of images and run through them to try and get a good config, it’s not something I want to try out in the cold :)

Anyone thought of building a neural net that you can train with images for your own setup?

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Nigel Dunmore replied to the topic 'GPS date and time wrong' in the forum. 12 months ago

Are you setting up ntp to get the date/time from your gps or just the indi drivers?

I setup a usb gps dongle recently (just because..) and configured ntp to get the time from gpsd by the shared memory driver. I also had the indi gpsd configured. Not sure if I really needed both for time but at least ntp would configure the system before I even got round to getting indi going.

In the end I decided that as my setup is static and my ipad feeds it gps and my internet connection time plus the cheap dongle I got didn’t lock onto the satellites very quickly, that there was no point in using it. ( I had my play time and decided the extra stress wasn’t worth it)

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