I was wondering if there is an easy way to have multiple camera's and focusers running and as an added bonus have dithering working ...
I would be tempted to build at least a dual setup Mono/RGB based on ASI or QHY CMOS camera and if that is possible maybe extend the number of cameras ...

/Yves

Can you run 2 instances of Kstars on your machine? I know I can do this on my Mac. Also If you have a raspberry pi setup on each scope, you can have KStars/INDI running on each and VNC to them each from your laptop to monitor the progress.

The goal would be to have indeed an RPI for each setup, and I could indeed VNC to all the instances ... but then I would need to give up on dithering as there is no sync between the different setups ...

/Yves

I too would like to run a dual imaging rig with KStars/Ekos/INDI. I currently have a single rig with RPi 3 running the rig with INDI drivers and indiserver and run KStars/Ekos on my indoor desktop under Linux Mint. I can run multiple copies of KStars.

Would I need to use two RPi systems or would it be possible to use just one controlling both cameras and focusers? The problem would seem to be distinguishing between cameras and focusers. There is just one mount control as both rigs are on the same mount.

I guess the simplest way would be with two RPi control boxes with one running the mount.

Hoi i have the same wishes, but for me its more that i like to have all sky camera in frame active to see the clouds situation
or/and webcams to check the observatory during images session

Chris

Hoi i have the same wishes, but for me its more that i like to have all sky camera in frame active to see the clouds situation
or/and webcams to check the observatory during images session

Chris

You can do this with just any software, we monitor that via a webpage. Multi cam support is important for imaging as you need coordination for dithering ...

/Yves

Well, that's an interesting challenge !

Theoricaly, it's possible with one indi server, two different cameras and two kstars connected to the same server. You can already use one camera for imaging and a second one for guiding, so why not ?. Plus this is the superiority of a server/client architecture like indi

But is it a good idea? remember everything goes through your single Pi. So if there is a problem, you break not only one but your two imaging sessions. Oooops !

Let's try something...

First we start the server
Don't use the indi webmanager to start the server. Make a little shell script to start it manually.

---

#!/bin/bash

FIFO_FILE=/tmp/indiserver@fedberry
[ -e $FIFO_FILE ] && echo $FIFO_FILE exists ! || mkfifo $FIFO_FILE
/usr/bin/indiserver -v -m 100 -p 7624 -f $FIFO_FILE indi_yourmount_telescope indi_simulator_telescope indi_ccd1 indi_ccd2 indi_focuser1 indi_focuser2 >> /var/log/indiserver.log 2>&1 &

---

Now on the desktop, start two terminal sessions, under two different logins, each one launching one instance of Kstars.

On the first Kstars your profile will be :
- Your Mount
- The first cameras
- The first focuser

On the second Kstars your profile will be:
- Mount simulator (I'm not sure this is mandatory as Ekos only asks for one camera)
- The second camera
- The second focuser

Remember you must use two different cameras and two different focusers or they will appear under the same name in Ekos.

The best way to avoid the bottleneck of the Pi is probably to start the images on each camera so that at the end of the exposure, the two downloads do not occur at the same time.

Example for a 60 secs exposure :

- One starts the exposure now
- the second starts 20 seconds later.

Well, that is just a start ...
See my post as a box with some ideas to pick, not only for you but for every one here. It's certainly not a complete solution You risk nothing to try ...
- Marc

PS: I personally use 4 PIs to control 4 scopes from the same laptop. I think it's more secure.