×

INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

Esatto not connecting on Mac, wrong driver loaded?

  • Posts: 58
  • Thank you received: 2
Well, I have similar issues with my Baader Steeldrive II and Ekos. 
However, it’s working out of the box with TheSkyX.

So the big unanswered question is why I need extra drivers for Ekos but not for TheSky?
indilib.org/forum/focusers-filter-wheels...i-won-t-connect.html
2 years 4 months ago #78114

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 207
  • Thank you received: 18
Thank you Rob, and it would indeed be a great help if we collect the various combinations that work (and don't work) in the documentation. The outcomes will probably be different for the different devices, so perhaps the most logical place would be to add it to the individual drivers INDI-page.
It seems like there are several variables that are relevant:
- the USB to Serial bridge controller chip in the device (focuser, USB>Serial cable, etc)
- the version of the virtual com-port driver (the brand is determined by the chip)
- the macOS version
As far as chips and drivers go, the three main brands that keep coming up are: Prolific, FTDI and Silabs
As far as macOS version is concerned this may be limited to: before Big Sur vs Big Sur and later.
The drivers use system extensions. Before Big Sur these were Kernel extensions, using little system files with the extension .kext. In Catalina so called driver extensions were introduced, making use of DriverKit. Kernel extensions require terminal commands to install and normally you won't see them. Driver extensions install as an app and remain visible as an app in the Applications folder. Catalina introduced Driver extensions. From Big Sur onwards, this was mandatory.
so perhaps we can add an extra line with each INDI driver for which we have the information.

For the Sesto Senso 2 and Esatto focusers this could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, a separate USB-Serial driver needs to be installed. The legacy Silabs driver version 4.* can be found here . Installation requires macOS 10.14 (Catalina) or lower. So far, it has not been possible to establish a proper connection using either driver version 6.* or macOS 11 (Big Sur) and higher.

For the Microtouch focuser (based on another thread on this topic), it could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, a separate USB-Serial driver needs to be installed. The latest Silabs driver can be found here . This driver has shown to work on macOS 12 (Monterey) and is likely to work on 10.14 (Catalina) and 11 (Big Sur). For older macOS version, the legacy Silabs driver may be required, which can be found here .  

Even so, it would be good to know from people who have no problems with focusers and their Macs, for which it could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, no separate USB-Serial drivers need to be installed. The required drivers are embedded in the macOS. This has been tested on macOS versions .....

Finally it looks like most issues occur with focusers and USB-Serial cables, but perhaps there are other devices as well? USB-serial cables probably have an infinite amount of manufacturers. But they probably all use one of the three chips. Perhaps we could create a general sentence on USB-serial cables, and point people to the three drivers mentioned. We could add that sentence to the devices that have a traditional serial (DB-9?) interface.

Just a few thoughts, Rob. Happy to help further where I can. I've got a Monterey and Mojave setup that I can use. But only have the Primalucelab focusers as hardware that I can test.

Willem Jan.
2 years 4 months ago #78123

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 2876
  • Thank you received: 809
Without more info I couldn’t tell you.  I don’t have the sky x and they are a proprietary system. I don’t know if they have a different way of communicating with the focuser or if somehow they have a built in usb serial driver in their software.  I also don’t know about this specific device or the INDI driver.  Perhaps one of the authors of this INDI driver would know or maybe someone who has the sky x and this device could look into it or ask the company that makes the hardware or the makers of that software.

I do contribute to KStars and INDI.  I build the Mac version, make some contributions to the software, and I have fixed a couple of problems with INDI drivers for macs a time or two.  I also made an INDI driver once.  But every device and driver is different.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Oliver
2 years 4 months ago #78124

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 2876
  • Thank you received: 809
Jan,

Thank you for all those details.  Yes that is the same set of issues that I would have, that I only have experience with my own equipment and what works on my system.  And yes very much there are a large number of different possible drivers.  But yes you might be right that there are really just a small number of usb serial devices that just get reused in different devices and that might make things simpler.  But all this is why INDI and KStars are very much a group effort. And all these kinds of contributions are very useful.

so yes I think if we can start gathering this kind of information then we can revise the documentation to include it as you said.  I think we definitely should include a short set of instructions in my getting started document to point the folks to the INDI driver pages and then on those pages include the latest info for each device.
2 years 4 months ago #78125

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 207
  • Thank you received: 18
Sounds good. If there is anything I can help with, please let me know. As you say, it's a group effort.
2 years 4 months ago #78127

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 58
  • Thank you received: 2
If you follow the link you’ll see that TheSky is using the same USB driver as Ekos. 
indilib.org/forum/focusers-filter-wheels...i-won-t-connect.html

The Baader driver is maintained by Jasem.
However, I don’t think that he could help because it is a Mac issue.

I could easily get the USB driver for my device and maybe it’s working.
But I don’t want to install unnecessary external drivers that have to be maintained and probably brake compatibility with one of the next MacOS iterations. 

Oli
Last edit: 2 years 4 months ago by Oliver.
2 years 4 months ago #78136

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 207
  • Thank you received: 18
This issue is back again, as the work-around (use macOS Mojave) does not work anymore for KStars 3.6.0. Is anyone else having this problem? Rob, do you have any suggestions how this could be fixed?
1 year 6 months ago #85998

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 2876
  • Thank you received: 809
So, if I remember and understand this correctly, the issue here is that the USB - Serial adapters for several devices require a driver. Those drivers used to use kernel extensions in the old MacOS versions. But now kexts have been discontinued by MacOS. Now MacOS requires something new called "driver extensions" which are more like a program running instead of a part of the system. I assume the problem is that some older adapters may not have driver extension application programs that support this new standard, at least not at this time since it is a newer standard. Is this correct?

Sorry I got distracted from this since I was working on a bunch of other things, such as getting automated builds on craft, but we should probably come back to this and make it more of a priority. First, people won't be able to use devices unless they download the right driver program and install it and we really should have documentation somewhere about this. Also, we should know if there are any that do not currently work because they don't have such a program. And we should try to learn any workarounds or complications to tell users about them. This probably is one of the biggest issues for Mac users right now since we solved some of the other issues earlier.
1 year 6 months ago #86026

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 207
  • Thank you received: 18
Thanks Rob. Yes, that is exactly the issue.
Not sure though if its older adapters and/or extension application programs that don't support the new standard. As far as I understand the Silabs CP210x bridges are still very common serial/USB adapters. And they have released specific driver extension application programs for the Mac of less than a year old. But somehow it goes wrong between the INDI driver and the extension program.
It would indeed be great if we could somehow find a solution. For now I've gone back to my Ubuntu machine, but would like to keep using the Mac.

One thought came up and that is that the error message is about not able to acquire a Serial Number from the focuser. Would it make sense If we try to delete that request the driver makes and see what happens? If it is really the connection, we may just get a similar error but then with the next request from the driver. However, if it has something to do with the focuser not presenting its serial number through this new interface correctly, it may work. Having the serial number is not crucial.

Yes, you are right, where there are issues like this, it would be good to include some documentation on that. At the time I had written a few lines that we might be able to use:

For the Sesto Senso 2 and Esatto focusers this could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, a separate USB-Serial driver needs to be installed. The legacy Silabs driver version 4.* can be found here . Installation requires macOS 10.14 (Catalina) or lower. So far, it has not been possible to establish a proper connection using either driver version 6.* or macOS 11 (Big Sur) and higher.

For the Microtouch focuser (based on another thread on this topic), it could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, a separate USB-Serial driver needs to be installed. The latest Silabs driver can be found here . This driver has shown to work on macOS 12 (Monterey) and is likely to work on 10.14 (Catalina) and 11 (Big Sur). For older macOS version, the legacy Silabs driver may be required, which can be found here .

Even so, it would be good to know from people who have no problems with focusers and their Macs, for which it could look like:
For this INDI driver to work properly on a Mac, no separate USB-Serial drivers need to be installed. The required drivers are embedded in the macOS. This has been tested on macOS versions .....


Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help here. I understand this is a difficult issue and I'm unfortunately not a software engineer. But I can test things out.

Best regards, Willem Jan.
1 year 6 months ago #86030

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 2876
  • Thank you received: 809
Yes this is a very good start. You may not be a software engineer but you definitely know more about this issue right now than I do. I like the stuff that you wrote so far. Also, I am not a software engineer, but I do know a decent amount about programming and I'm not too bad at it. It is a hobby so I don't have unlimited time to devote to it, but I think if we focus more on this problem in the next couple of weeks, we can certainly sort some things out and improve the situation. I just finished fixing several serious macOs bugs, so I think we can focus more on this one now. I think for me, the first thing I could do is run some tests on my own Mac using kstars and indi and see which devices that I own use these sorts of drivers and whether they are still working. I usually use a raspberry pi and remotely control it on my Mac using kstars, so I haven't tried this in awhile. A few years ago when I was porting KStars to Mac and working out various issues with INDI etc, I did run a bunch of tests with various devices I own and I know I installed a driver or two to make them work. I seem to remember that was the case at least with my Moonlite Focuser and two serial to USB adapters for my two mounts. I can try those again to see if they still work and test any other things too.
The following user(s) said Thank You: W J Drijfhout
1 year 6 months ago #86033

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 207
  • Thank you received: 18
That sounds great Rob, and please let me know if there is anything I can do on this side to experiment with.
1 year 6 months ago #86034

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

  • Posts: 33
  • Thank you received: 0
Oh man, this is me exactly. I am trying to run EKOS on MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip, running the Esatto autofocuser. I am a software developer but my C/C++ experience is way stale and not really a device guy. I did figure out that I needed to install the driver from Silicon Labs and now see EKOS connect to the autofocuser at some level but see the missing serial number error. I totally agree that I want to see what happens if EKOS doesn't ask for SN. I suspect that we will just get an error for the next requested param.

What IDE do you Kstars/EKOS devs use? I saw some mention of a QT dev environment. I could potentially help with this (I'm recently retired) but brand new to this domain and I've never had to debug a USB device before so I'd have to claw up the learning curve.

Dave.
1 year 5 months ago #86811

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

Time to create page: 0.465 seconds