Hy and Thomas,

I believe the timeout problem is unrelated to dark subtraction as I also experience these timeouts although I never use dark subtraction. I reported the problem here indilib.org/forum/ekos/10329-sequence-qu...t-of-step.html#75373

It could well be the dark subtraction problem and the camera timeout are unrelated and just happened to coincide. I started a separate thread and included some log info per Hy's request. I did not get another freeze last night so I don't have a verbose log at this point.

The timeout issue is unrelated to darks, two separate issues. Perhaps timeout is more important. Can you test guide looping? Does it timeout after a while?

What do you mean, "guide looping"? I do guide all night long and the "guide cam timeout" occurs several times during a night. It does work for hours and then out of nowhere the guide cam hangs. Once the main cam light frame is received, guiding is restarted and works for hours again until the timeout suddenly occurs again, without any user activity.

I don't know if this has been discussed in the past, but would it be possible to separate guiding from the rest of Ekos so the guider could run on a separate machine. In my setup Indiserver runs on a Rpi on the mount, while Kstars/Ekos run indoors on my Mac. The problem is that guide images need to come from the Rpi to my Mac. With multistar guiding it would be difficult to limit the amount of data transferred. So, a lot of data transferred during an imaging session is guiding related, which I suspect is responsible for comms related issues in my setup. There is also the delay to guiding whilst the most recent guiding image is transferred; which encourages me to lower the guiding interval to compensate (which probably makes the issue worse).

(I'm aware this can be done with PHD2 but would prefer to use the internal guider).

For most convenience the guiding gui would still be part of the Ekos gui, just the processing engine would need to run a server process deployable to another machine.

I've seen a few posts on IndiHub recently; this could be a good addition for this product.

I also would like this feature to run the internal guider on RPi while running Ekos on laptop

I third this suggestion (EKOS to run on separate processor).  This would be make running KStars on a separate machine usable, without having to use PHD2.

 

I found running kstars on a mac client with internal guiding running on an rPi4 quite useable - over a wired ethernet connection. Probably could be dicey on wifi.

Agreed, but I have an observatory 500 feet away - and the delay of having my home computer process guiding is too much. I have to use PHD2 or use VNC and run KStars at the observatory.

@Thomas Mason - How did you achieve running Kstars on Mac and only the internal guiding on RPi please?

It runs on the mini but through the rPi.  Using the rPi as server to Mac kstars client the internal guider works fine.  I have a wired Ethernet connection so the lag for guide camera image files is not really a problem.  My wording was a little ambiguous kstars and ekos run on the Mac and control everything (including auto guide).   The rPi serves up the devices (mount, cameras, etc) to the Mac.

You got me all excited and thought you had cracked the problem thats evading us