Hi all

As I'm still pretty new to Ekos/Indi, I hope you can forgive me should I write any wrong assumptions or conclusions.

With KStars 3.3.8 I could produce pretty good frames. Polar alignment and guide calibration where both done smoothly and I was able to take frames a whole night.
Last week I went to the mountains here where the sky is perfectly dark. In the meantime I had upgraded to KStars 3.3.9.

Polar alignment takes the first image and solves it and then text next step is to crash KStars. This happens many times, or lets say I dropped the idea of doing a Ekos based polar alignment. The unsuccessful polar alignment is my minor problem.

My biggest problem is the calibration in the guide module. Ekos selects a star and stars the calibration. The movements of the mount that the calibration routine issues are so small that even after 10 calibration step the selected star hardly moves. About 1 out of 5 calibrations, the guide module actually accepts the calibration as successful and stars guiding, the other 4 times calibration aborts with the message that the star didn't move enough.
But as I was assuming that the calibration is good after noticing that the guider is working I started to take frames.
While doing so I checked the guide module and I was pretty shocked about the correction graphs of the guider. The selected star jumped around like a ping-pong ball, it was most of the time in the red or yellow zone, rarely in the green. Of course all my frames were unusable.
I think that Ekos accepted the calibration even though the star movement was too small during the calibration.

The next day at home I installed PHD2 after waiting for a long time until PHD2 was finally ported to 64bit macOS and immediately went out to test it.
With PHD2 the very same happens. Calibration aborts with the message, that the star didn't move enough. After 40 calibration steps that star moved around 5px. I tries all options in PHD2 and received good help from the PHD2 forum.
In PHD2, I connected my mount with INDI, the guide camera was directly connected to PHD2. The connection and communication between INDI and PHD2 was up and running.

Yesterday evening I tried everything again with the same results. But this time I turned on the verbose logging with the hope that I can get help here.

This is only my own assumption: As I did not change any setting in Ekos/Indi after I upgraded to 3.3.9 I guess that something changed with regards to controlling my mount. All goto, slew and mount moves from the scope controller for perfectly, its the guide or the calibration which is causing problems.

My equipment:
Mount: Astro-Physics 900GTO with CP3, connected to INDI with the lx200apdriver, Telescope: TEC140ED
CCD: QHY367C connected to INDI
Guider: QHY5II-L connected to INDI, Guidescope: 240mm f4

Did something change from KStars 3.3.8 to 3.3.9 that could have an influence in the control of my mount? Is there something that I should change/check?

I hope that someone can help me. I can provide more log files is it is necessary.

Thank you very much for your help.
Thomas

I attached the following files:

I forgot to mention an important detail: I use a MacBook with macOS catalina to run Kstars, PHD2.

Did you try LX200 AP Experimental driver?

I tried it once or twice to connect with the experimental, but I remember that I was not able to connect my mount (but I don't remember the log messages anymore).
As far as I know, I should not use the experimental driver with my mount with the CP3 controller. Is this wrong? My controller is more than 10 years old...

Right, if you go to the GUIDE TAB in the driver in INDI Control Panel and enter some pulses there manually then press SET, do you see any changes in the RA/DE coordinates? for example, set NORTH to 3000 and press SET, the DEC should slightly change. Do you see that?

No, I try try this, but I will do it tonight.
What I did is moving the mount with the direction buttons in the manual guide module in PHD2. These buttons send a pulse command and the mount actually moves. The implementation of the lx200AP driver limits the pulse length to 999ms but I could see the coordinates change when I clicked to any of the direction buttons. The move was very small but I could see (and hear) that the mount moves.
Are these buttons in PHD doing the same as the direction buttons in INDI's guide tab?

Yes it should be the same... so if the mount moves with these pulses then maybe it's not moving enough? or there is some backlash issue? At night, find a star and then issue these commands and see if you can notice somewhat noticable motion. The guide calibration only needs few pixels of motion in both axis to recognize the trend and calibrate correctly.

I will try this tonight, also to connect with the experimental driver.

Do you tend more towards a problem with the mount itself than to a problem with software?

Jasem, I found out what was wrong - or better I found who made the mistake.
I made a mistake that shouldn't occur for someone who is doing astro photography since 20 years, but I did. I started the guiding calibration with the scope still on Polaris...
Now it works smoothly and correct.
Thank you very much for your support and sorry for my mistake.
Thomas

Glad the issue is resolved!