Hello, I've been an Astroberry user for years, worked out lots of little issues many times and its been working great.
In the last week ive noticed my mount not preforming the meridian flip, it counts down, hits the MF process but then I hear the stand only move for a moment and it fails. It will keep failing until it hits the HA limit too, no matter how long I set it for (within reason).
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.482 AEST DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Mount status changed from "Slewing" to "Tracking"
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.483 AEST DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Slew finished, MFStatus "FLIP_RUNNING"
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.503 AEST WARN ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Meridian flip failed, pier side not changed
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.503 AEST INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - "meridian flip failed, retrying in 4 minutes"

The only thing I can think of is I was pressing some buttons under the INDI settings for my mount encoders, cant remember exactly what I pressed but I've since purged, set defaults and saved many times trying to fix it.
So a couple of days ago I set everything up inside the garage during the day to try and figure it out and capture some logs.
Tried many times with no success, the HA offset and everything is fine, I can go about an hour past the meridian without colliding into my stand and I tried even at 30mins past the meridian but no joy.

So I bit the bullet and formatted the SD card, installing a fresh copy of Astroberry, setup my networks and updated everything after the install with apt get update and such.
To my dismay I had the exact same issue!!
I thought, its got to be the EQ6R!
Plugged in the EQ6R and updated the firmware on the Motor Controllers, couldnt find anywhere else to restore defaults as I dont have a hand controller, everything is done through the Synscan app on the PC.
Tried again and nothing... was pretty confused and frustrated at this point and gave up for the day.

The next day I thought to reinstall Astroberry again but not do any updates.
Suddenly everything is working !
I tested a meridian flip many times in the garage with 100% success rate.
Slightly confused but happy that I could get back to using the scheduler again I packed up and got ready for tonight.

Dusk hit and I was setup and ready to go.
Booted everything up and I was getting crash after crash. Try to focus, crash. Try to plate solve, crash.
I thought ok lets update it and pray...
Parked the scope and took the Pi4 inside to update.

Booted everything up after the update and no more crashing at all but the damn MF problem is back (pun intended ).

Some things I noticed tonight which were kind of weird. (with a fresh updated install of Astroberry on a 1 month old 8gb Pi4)
1. When plate solving I notice its off by quite a bit which makes me think the stand isnt where it thinks it is 10000 arc sec or so.
2. After syncing 6 points so to have a good alignment model I slewed close to the meridian, the stand started slewing the wrong way, it got close to the star and then hit the HA limit... the alignment was getting my targets within 100arc seconds on the first slew beforehand so the stand should have known better !!
3. After syncing many points I parked the scope and noticed it wasnt exactly pointed at the celestial pole, I believe this has something to do with it, perhaps the encoder settings are off ? ...

What confuses me is that the Astroberry install straight off the downloadable image - with no updates - didnt have a problem with the meridian flip.

I have some logs I can post, of both successful and failed attempts of the flip.

Its never been an issue for years, the HA limits and flip delay arent to blame as ive tried many combinations.
LST was confirmed to be accurate also.

Anyway sorry for the long post but thats my situation at the moment, really hoping someone can help me get to the bottom on it because im totally stumped !

I'm using a belt modded NEQ6 and have had some MF troubles with it in the past. As soon as the position and time used by the mount deviate from the position and time in Ekost, strange things will happen during MF.

There are 2 things you can check:

1. Check the time of the mount and compare it with Ekos. If both times do not coincide, you will get a discrepancy between the time of the mount and Ekos.



2. Do you have slack between the RA/DEC worms, or are they perhaps too tight? This can cause the mount to skip steps and you will get a discrepancy between the position of the mount and Ekos.