Hi there,
I'm a novice with all things Kstars and Astro.

I just bought a used Orion Starshoot guide camera, I selected its' correct driver in the "Guider" drop-down menu of the profile setup n EKOS, but when I start EKOS I get this message...

2020-12-02T11:35:56 Unable to establish:
+ QHY CCD
Please ensure the device is connected and powered on.

My telescope and DSLR are both found fine by EKOS, and I know that the Orion Starshoot camera and cable both work fine as PHD2 works fine with them. I found a thread on this issue but it is too technical for my current knowledge, it seems to suggest that updating the Indi library is the solution, or deleting and replacing it. However I don't know how to do that.

Could someone please post a non-techy step-by-step on how to do this?? I am using Kstars on a MacBook Air and only installed it a few days ago, so I assumed all drivers would be the latest versions.

Many thanks in advance.

Paul

Well nobody replied, so I guess I'll have to go with PHD2 guiding instead of the EKOS internal guider, as PHD2 works fine with the Orion SSAG. You'd think it would be a simple enough matter to move whatever INDI driver PHD2 is using for the SSAG ( which works ) into the EKOS environment. If anyone knows how to do that, or any other way to fix this problem, I'd appreciate if they could let me know. By the way, I think EKOS is an unbelievable piece of software from what I see so far, huge congratulations to the developers, what a labour of love this must be! Thank you.

Sorry if no one answered your post. I think you should elaborate a bit on your issue, with screenshots for instance. You are stating you added an Orion guider, then observe that Ekos cannot connect the QHY sensor. Because those events are quite unrelated, many people are perhaps waiting for more information to arrive or for someone else with the same issue to chime in.

-Eric

Thank you for replying Eric, I’ll try to be more specific.

As I mentioned, I’m completely new to Astronomy and Astrophotography, I’m trying to teach myself a new hobby and learning new equipment and software, so bear with me if I’m just making some obvious beginner mistakes here.

To get going in this I bought the following equipment…
Skywatcher 200DPS Newtonian telescope.
Explore Scientific EXOS-2 PMC-Eight goto mount
Orion 50mm guide scope.
Orion Starshoot Autoguider camera ( SSAG ) - used.
Telrad, 2 Barlows, 2 Lenses.
I already owned the following…
MacBook Air laptop
Nikon DSLR (D3200)

After learning to use various available software ( Stellarium, Explore Scientific ExploreStars, PHD2, AstroDSLR and more) I decided to give KSTARS / EKOS a try as it seems to be a wonderful all-in-one solution for Astrophotography on the Mac, and of course it’s free!.

I first set up a Profile in the EKOS Profile editor with just the Nikon DSLR and PMC-8 Mount, and on hitting Start all the equipment is reported as recognized and works fine, I can slew the mount under KSTARS an take pictures to my hard drive with the DSLR.

However when I add the Orion SSAG guide camera to the profile and hit start, I get this message…

“2020-12-10T13:17:06 Unable to establish:
+ QHY CCD
Please ensure the device is connected and powered on.”

I understand that the SSAG is a QHY camera, so that message must refer to the SSAG camera.

To make sure this problem is not caused by the mount or DSLR, I eliminated them from my profile and replaced them with the Telescope and CCD Simulators, but still got the same message that the SSAG ( QHY ) is not recognized, I attach a a screenshot of that, as well as my original profile.

FYI, I am using the latest Kstars Version 3.5.0 Build: 2020-11-20T20:42:55Z under Mac Catalina 10.15.7 operating system. I have also tried deleting and re-installing Kstars, but the problem persists.

I hope this explains my problem better, and thank you for any help you can give in fixing this.

Please try the DMG that I uploaded the other day which was built on December 7th (I think). There is a QHY issue that we are trying to resolve. I attempted to resolve this and a couple of other Mac specific issues with that build. The new build has a new QHY driver, but I know it still won't work for anyone who has a system that is older than 10.15, since it wasn't built with the correct minimum OS flag. So. I'm currently waiting for the updated driver. but you did say you have 10.15 correct?

On a Mac, you can't update the INDI library as easily as on Linux, but it is bundled in the KStars distribution DMG. So if you update KStars, it will update this.

Also if you could, please try starting this driver with the "Device Manager" in KStars, since it will print much more useful information about what's going wrong so we can diagnose it.

Thank you rlancaste ! I'll give this a try and report back. Yes I'm using OSX 10.15.7

Hi Robert,
Here's the Readout from EKOS Device Manager startup of SSAG driver from the Dec 7th Kstars build as you suggested, with the SSAG being the only physical device connected.....

2020-12-10T19:37:11: startup: /Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/indi/indiserver -v -p 7624 -m 300 -r 0 -f /tmp/indififo4e2f1d4a
2020-12-10T19:37:11: listening to port 7624 on fd 3
FIFO: start indi_qhy_ccd
FIFO: Starting driver indi_qhy_ccd
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: pid=15535 rfd=4 wfd=7 efd=15
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResource()|START
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResource|auto_detect_camera:false,call InitQHYCCDResourceInside
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResourceInside|START
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|CamSendSingleImageThread| single .....................
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Client 5: new arrival from 127.0.0.1:56679 - welcome!
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|libusb_init(NULL) called...
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResourceInside|numdev set to 0
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResourceInside|END
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: ************************** config file path ************************************
2020-12-10T19:37:11: Driver indi_qhy_ccd: QHYCCD|QHYCCD.CPP|InitQHYCCDResource|Load ini filePath = /Applications fileName = qhyccd.ini


And here's the readout from EKOS control panel startup of the SSAG driver, also with just the SSAG camera connected.......

2020-12-10T20:43:55 Unable to establish:
+ QHY CCD
Please ensure the device is connected and powered on.
2020-12-10T20:43:52 Guider port from Telescope Simulator is ready.
2020-12-10T20:43:51 Telescope Simulator is online.
2020-12-10T20:43:51 Telescope Simulator is online.
2020-12-10T20:43:50 CCD Simulator filter is online.
2020-12-10T20:43:50 Guider port from CCD Simulator is ready.
2020-12-10T20:43:50 CCD Simulator is online.
2020-12-10T20:43:50 INDI services started on port 7624.
2020-12-10T20:43:50 Starting INDI services...

Please let me know if I can do any other tests that might be of help.

Regards, Paul

Do you get the message ''No QHY cameras detected. Power on?" or not?

That is the message that popped up for me, of course I don't have one attached.

No, I haven't seen that message. Just this one as I posted above....

2020-12-10T20:43:55 Unable to establish:
+ QHY CCD
Please ensure the device is connected and powered on.

It might be in a popup window like this:

Sometimes those popups end up behind other windows.

I am just trying to see if there is any indication of what could be wrong because so far, I don't see any issue