So I live in the Chicago area and with winter creeping in I would like to find a solution that doesn't require me sitting outside and/or leaving my laptop outside in the cold.  I have a celestron nexstar 6se with a ZWO camera and starsense.  I can literally sit on the other side of a sliding glass door so i wont be far from the system.  I live in an apartment so drilling a small hole in the wall to pass a cable probably isn't a solution.  I have heard about astroberry and I was curious if it is pretty "easy" to set up for nexstar.  I have seen different messages that it may not work with a non eq mount.  I am just trying to see what my options are.  I know some people mentioned just putting the laptop in a rubbermaid bin and it would keep itself warm enough, but if I can keep it inside that would be preferred.  Any help on guiding me in the right direction would be very appreciated. 

indilib.org/telescopes/celestron/celestron-nexstar.html seems to be supported (I have no experience with it). I don’t know about starsense, as Kstars/Ekos does platesolving and polar alignment using platesolving.

Using an Astroberry you can operate your mount and camera via VNC using your browser or a VNC client. It provides either a hotspot or uses your home WiFi. Do NOT use a metal casing for the RasPi, as this greatly reduces the WiFi range.

I tested connecting my NexStar 8 SE today via USB and it was a success. I was able to connect and slew using KStars. 
I can't check further as I have been clouded out for a few weeks now... 

Thanks so much for the information. I know what my goal is for the long weekend now.

Awesome. Seems good enough for me to at least attempt since the equipment is fairly cheap. Thanks for testing it out.

Good luck! I got to test it in the field yesterday. Slews and plate-solves worked great. Tracking got better after plate-solving in different parts of the sky. Didn't have to align, that was a plus. 

So I am working to set up my astroberry. I connect to it through the hotspot it produces and I add the information for my WiFi network but it never a list it as an option to connect to. If I click join hidden network I can select the network profile I added and it boots me off but I can’t connect my laptop to it without connecting back to the hotspot. What am I doing wrong?

 

I ended up getting it. For some reason I could t get it to connect 5 GHz so I changed to 2.4 and got it working.

Now I just have to figure out how to connect everything. So I plug  the usb cable into the bottom of my handset and connect to zwo camera into the pi. I was having some issues connecting and then I can’t connect to my starsense it seems. Will I not need my starsense?  

so my equipment is 
astroberry server
6se and nexstar mount
224mc camera
celestron focuser

the focuser connects to the mount. The camera and hand control have independent usb connections which will go to the pi. 

 

Do you mind sharing your configuration with me?  I keep getting errors when trying to connect.  My ZWO camera connects, but the mount and focuser seem to be having issues.  I built my profile astroberry and then the same in Ekos, but the mount keeps failing (Celestron GPS.

So I have a usb for my camera going to my pi and a usb from the bottom of my hand control going to my pi.  I assume this counts as serial connection and not a networked connection correct?  My focuser is plugged into an aux port.

I have a similar setup:
- Astroberry running on Pi
- NexStar 8 SE from hand controller to USB 2.0 port on the Pi, (serial connection)
- ZWO (or QHY) camera plugged into USB 3.0 port
- JMI focuser USB controller plugged into USB 2.0 port
- No Celestron focuser or Star Sense (Star Sense is not needed as INDI EKOS has a plate-solving module)

I would recommend trying connecting one component at a time starting with mount and seeing how that works out. 

I think I forgot to turn the power on the mount because I saw the hand control lit up from the usb. Tested again today and got everything to work. Now I just have to learn about ekos/kstars to learn how to set up a session.

Quick question. Since I don’t have a guide scope right now the nexstar gets pointed at an object and just moves in a known path (or something like the I believe). I guess I mean it is t visually checking to make sure it is on target. So now when I use kstars and such will it still continue that path or will I have to manually move it?