Made some tests with AstroArch yesterday.
Unfortunatly my guiding cam (Touptek) seems to be defective (lots of timeout messages while waiting for pictures) and after a while INDI disconnects all Touptek devices.
That occured, when guiding was active and I tried to make some subs. This is very likely a hardware defect of the guiding cam.


What worked:
- Polar Alignment Assistant
- PlateSolving
- Guiding (until it crashes, but I think that's hardware related)
- Focusing: DeepSkyDad AF3 can be controlled by INDI, but I have to learn about new concepts and parameters to set proper parameter values
- Image trains (new feature for me)

I think that this version of AstroArch is finally usable
Ordered a new guiding cam, will test more, when it has arrived.

Regards
Stefan

Also tested AstroArch under the stars (and full moon and clouds) last night with good results. I used NoVNC in Firefox on my laptop and like the clarity this provides - maybe something to do with fonts and colours.

I immediately hit a couple of bugs in KStars 3.6.5 ‘Stable’ which I’ll report elsewhere.

@Avocette @Stefan

I am incredibly grateful for your tests and your feedback!

@Stefan I tend to agree with the hardware issue, eventually it could be a bad USB cable maybe but it seems the driver works properly with a main touptek camera so you may have a point there.

Second night under the stars. Some strange movements of my EQMOD mount (targeting below the horizon for instance) and couldn’t get guiding to calibrate, mount movements seemed very small even as I increased pulse sizes to 5000. Again, this seems KStars 3.6.5 related…..

[edit] …… yes it’s my understanding of optical trains that got this wrong! The ‘guider’ setting in my secondary train should have been set to EQMOD:

In the absence of further user instructions the tool tips are pretty clear……although what is correct for the primary chain is ambiguous…..

I guess no entry is needed here, just leave the -

Hi @Mattia - third night with prospects of clear sky - in the end a couple of hours session with great performance of AstroArch! Learning some new features of KStars 3.6.5 but all went well. Here is the result of 20 x 180 seconds at -10° with my ASI533MC and SW ED80. Guiding was not the best (typically 1.2 arcsecs) probably due to seeing and proximity to the Zenith.

Hi Ed,

good to see, that it works for your config with zwo driver.
Think, my new guiding cam will arrive at friday. It is a svbony 305m. So my next AstroArch test will be with Touptek, SVBony, DeepSkyDad Af3, and Skywatcher EQMod.
Will give feedback here.

Regards
Stefan

Hi @Mattia.
I should mention that I downloaded the captured files directly to my Windows laptop using the SMB server you have included in AstroArch - fast and convenient!
When considering further developments, I feel I am missing a couple of widgets that I would normally keep an eye on. Firstly, my RPi4 4GB are in metal (flirc) cases without fans. For comfort I like to have the CPU temperature displayed along with CPU activity level and RAM occupancy.
Secondly, I don’t plan to install RTC units, and instead find it quite convenient to set the date and time with “sudo date -s …etc” at the beginning of a session. I would like the digital clock to show the time including seconds so that I can easily check against the laptop clock which is regularly synchronised with the internet when not connected to the AstroArch hotspot.
Thanks, Ed

Hi Ed,

happy to hear that things start to work out, really!

To your points:
- clock: I believe you can definitely show the seconds in the system clock from the options, I am pretty confident KDE offers this as well as it's a pretty common thing
- resources: unfortunately it seems that the kernel for the raspberry pi (AstroArch does not use the ArchLinux kernel) does not play well with the plasma widgets, the CPU and RAM widgets are available already but if you enable those they are always empty. I will try to dig more on the topic, eventually I may come up with a custom program to do so if it's not possible

Tonight i'm testing with a new SVBony 305m guiding cam.
Not a single problem with AstroArch, it runs very stable in the actual version (with my hardware).
Made a complete session with PAA, Platesolving, Guiding, Dithering, Flats with defined ADU. Everything went very well.
I am using KStars/EKOS/INDI for about 3 years until now and it is one of the rare nights without any problems with the soft- or hardware
I'll go to bed now, but the software still makes more subs of ngc7023. Will post the result tomorrow.
Regards
Stefan

Hi, the system was stable and made subs while I slept
One little "strangeness": It didn't slew to park position at 4:30 as configured, but the mountstate this morning was "parked".
Not really a problem. Everything was stable and I made some subs of ngc7032:

From now on AstroArch will replace my 32Bit Astroberry installation

Regards
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

first, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated it has a lot of value for me!

I am personally happy this project entered the live phase after so much effort (and ups and downs) where people are actually gathering subs and things work (white nights do not allow me to shoot at the moment )

I am planning to make some YT tutorials on the system and prolly some blogging about it.

If you guys share your pictures on your socials/astrobin may I ask you (yes yes I know ) to tag them with #teamastroarch ? It would mean a lot to me!

Hi Mattia,I don't publish my pictures on Astrobin.Can you provide a Link, I'll share that with every publication of my pictures that are produced with AstroArch.Last night I made a session again, AstroArch was stable and didn't have any problem. Again PAA, platesolve, focusser and cam worked reliable. I went to bed and the system made 3 hours of subs and slewed to parking position in the end.Added those lights to my ngc7023.
Regards Stefan