Hi there,

Just revisiting this to check on the status of each thing you listed.

Item 1: I thought this might be due to the QHY binary being out of date and that might or might not be the case. We will need to investigate further. Do you have any more logs for this issue, or did you run it from the Device Manager to see what error messages print out? Do you have any links to the 5 separate posts you mentioned, because I still haven't seen any but this one.

Item 2: I think I have identified and fixed this issue. I believe this was my mistake. When I first got KStars working on Mac, I had made a bunch of changes to the startup wizard to support it. When we were just about to release 3.5.0, I found suddenly that something had changed in craft that would mess up the way I made the wizard work on Mac, so I had to make some last minute changes. I thought I had it all correct, but apparently I missed several things. This weekend I identified the cause of the crash and fixed it. This will be fixed when I next release a DMG. Sorry we didn't find out about the Wizard issues until the last minute because all of the beta testers already had KStars installed on their systems and nobody was testing the wizard because it had worked for years with no issues.

Items 3 and 4: We think this is because you were using the wrong driver and trying to sync near the pole. I think you are planning to get the EQ Direct cable and use the EQMod INDI driver, right? That and not syncing near the pole should fix these 2 issues.

Item 5: Index Files should be downloaded at home prior to going out into the field.

If I am not mistaken, I think we have figured out all the issues except #1. I think we should look into that one further.

Thanks,

Rob

I just updated the DMG on the website, it includes the fix for the Wizard as well as the updated library for QHY

Rob,

Everything is now working as it’s supposed to!

My alignment/plate solve issues came from multiple causes. Due to driver issues, I couldn’t manually enter in RA and DEC position to sync a more accurate position that would allow for a successful plate solve. With my new EQDirect cable and using EQMOD, the mount now accepts the synced coordinates. With a better understanding of how alignment works, I made sure my Park position was set to Polaris, I always start each session pointing towards the pole, and I always end each session by re-Parking the mount. Alignment is super accurate now - repeatedly down to 7 arc seconds error.

The reason my mount would randomly stop slewing was because I had inadvertently set my battery pack to “pass through” power from the battery charger. Because the mount requires at least 3 amps, and the battery charger can only deliver 2 amps at most, this was causing the mount to undervolt and abruptly stop during high speed slewing.

I have not yet tested the newly compiled DMG for improved QHY driver performance. My recipe for success to get back to business here is to take a big step back, then take some baby steps forward, and solve one thing at a time. Trying to immediately use all of my equipment at once was spelling disaster for me. Best thing to do is to get one Ekos tab working at a time. Now that I can successfully work the alignment tab well, maybe next time I’m doing this I’ll take another look at autoguiding and play around with the QHY again.

Here’s a test image of M42 I took a could couple days ago, after a successful alignment. Thanks everyone for all of your help!! Sorry I was so frustrated. Glad to be back at it again!

Glad to hear it! That's a good plan for how to proceed.

Note that I am still waiting on an updated libqhy dylib for the qhy driver. As a result, right now QHY is still limited to systems that have 10.15 and above. Once it gets rebuilt, I can get a version up there that supports 10.13.