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Ekos detects not real mount movement, "jumping" on the screen

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Hello everybody!

  I think I have a quite odd behaviour on Ekos and I'll try my best to explain what happens. My setup is a EQ5 with EQMod and guided with a QHY5L-II-C before and a ASI 120MM Mini now, controlled by an Astroberry on RPi 4 with 4gb. Everything works normally fine, except for the two strange behaviours, but I'll ask for the second after this one is, hopefully, solved.

First one: sometime, often, I'd say once per minute, on KStars the mount makes a "sudden movement" that seems to "jump" the telescope pointer to a random direction very far away from the actual position, and by far I mean far, 90 or more degrees too. It looks like the program is detecting a sudden movement of the mount, but of course no movement is done and the mount is tracking nicely. In the mount log on Indi control panel this is an example of what is recorded for such "jumps":

2021-12-19T22:46:02: [WARNING] Horizon Limits: Scope at AZ=167.096 ALT=-23.796 is outside limits. Nothing to abort. 
2021-12-19T22:45:11: [WARNING] Horizon Limits: Scope at AZ=163.885 ALT=-16.541 is outside limits. Nothing to abort. 
2021-12-19T22:44:49: [WARNING] Horizon Limits: Scope at AZ=166.885 ALT=-23.676 is outside limits. Nothing to abort. 
2021-12-19T22:44:21: [WARNING] Horizon Limits: Scope at AZ=295.669 ALT=-43.693 is outside limits. Nothing to abort. 
2021-12-19T22:41:50: [WARNING] Horizon Limits: Scope at AZ=166.671 ALT=-23.981 is outside limits. Nothing to abort.

Another trail of what happens can be seen if I pulse guide, because it becomes absolutely impossible: Ekos reads a false movement so sends a correction based on that that totally spoils the guide. You can see this in this PHD2 sample graph:

File Attachment:

As said, if I guide via ST4 I still see the "jumps" on the KStars starmap but no strange PHD2 graph.

Does anyone have an idea of why this happens?

Thanks!
2 years 2 months ago #79352

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I have exactly the same configuration except I no longer use PHD2. The internal guider works just as good as PHD2. The jumping I am not sure, I have never seen this behaviour, although in my rig the elongation is usually associated with Polar alignment.

Attached is a guide for last night after I have done a polar alignment.
I have exactly the same configuration except I no longer use PHD2. The internal guider works just as good as PHD2. The jumping I am not sure, I have never seen this behaviour, although in my rig the elongation is usually associated with Polar alignment.

Attached is a guide for last night after I have done a polar alignment. 0.60 RMS TotalRA and DEC guiding, with RA at 0.4 and DEC at 0.45
  

I do not know how to recall any past guiding session to show elongation which I have confirmed due to polar alignment. 
2 years 2 months ago #79372
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Hi Malcolm,

thanks for the reply, I'll try also internal guiding, but I can't use pulse guiding but only ST4. Not a real disabling problem, but an annoyance that prevents the use of a lot of cool Ekos feature!
2 years 2 months ago #79401

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If you are using RPi for everything then check to see if the jumping correlates with the RPi freezing during certain capture periods. I have an 8Gb RAM and I notice that count down on the capture time freezes and so does the rest of the processes. It may be a display issue but maybe it affects your ST4 connection. I am clutching straws but give it a go and see if it correlates.
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2 years 2 months ago #79466

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I tought it could be something related to some "freezing" of the PI but it's a RPI4 with 4gb, I don't know if I could expect any problem... What could I do to tackle the problem?

Anywy in the last two days problems are jumping around like never before: the "jumps" on position, the 120MM Mini that drops bitrate from 16 to 8 and twiche happened that Ekos halted on a "Image write failed" error: is this all related to a PI fault or maybe microSD fault?
2 years 2 months ago #79486

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Since I have moved to control the RPi in remote mode, a lot of issues have disappeared. Maybe you could try it. If you are using Windows then connect using the Windows App and see if you get the same problem. If not then it will be a resource issue with the Pi.
2 years 2 months ago #79487

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how can I do it? do you mean using KStars on Windows?
2 years 2 months ago #79499

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Yes, you can download and install Kstar on Windows.

When you connect to the device the Setup in EKOS is done by setting it Yes, you can download and install Kstar on Windows.

When you connect to the device the Setup in EKOS is done by setting it to remote instead of locally. Below is my configuration, but mine is not the same as most others because I use an unsupported Focuser driver so I connect using the INDI web manager instead and that has all the same drivers plus the unsupported TIC Focuser ng.

 
2 years 2 months ago #79500
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worth giving a try for sure! won't be there any lagging due to transmission of data? i.e. guiding delays or like that?
2 years 2 months ago #79501

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I haven't seen any lagging since changing, although I didn't have the same issue as you, but I also do not use ST4 either
2 years 2 months ago #79542

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Yesterday and two days ago all worked fine with no troubles so I kept logging with VNC, anyway the jumps continue. I noticed that if the "jump" happens during the plate solving the it starts moving the scope in the jump direction spoiling any activities so far... It's a very strange behaviour, I'll try with Win suite to check if it happens anyway!
2 years 2 months ago #79634

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Hi Valerio

If you are having SD card issues, they should show up if you execute
dmesg
to get the kernel level messages

How are you connecting to the mount from the PI? What cable plugged into ? on the mount?
How are you powering the devices and PI?
What cable connections are you using, i.e. what are the various USB devices plugged into?
Are you using any usb hubs? Are they powered? USB2 or USB3 ? What is plugged into which?

Have you enabled logging for the EQMOD driver?
Main EKos screen ->Logs
Set Verbose and Drivers->Mount

The logs you provided
2021-12-19T22:46:02: [WARNING] Horizon Limits:

From what I can tell, the coordinates are read from the scope in the ReadScopeStatus routine then run through the alignment system chosen and horizon limits are checked there also.

Sorry if you have eliminated any of these already.

Gene
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2 years 2 months ago #79648

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