Astroberry Distro is ready to use SD card image for controlling your astronomical observatory.
It enables you to remote control your mount, telescope, focuser, ccd and more.
It has been prepared for all of you who do not want to play with installation and compilation. Instead it provides ready to use system, which is fully functional just after flashing your SD card.

You can find it here .

Wow, thanks!

What I read in the readme looks great! Might you explain it a bit further? I mean, is lin_guider connecting to INDI guider cam? Mine is not
Can autoguiding and everything be controlled through the web interface? Does it mean you developed INDI devices for autoguiding and plate solving? It sounds too good to be true

lin_guider works as a standalone application, accessible via web interface (noVNC X desktop web server on RPi) with HTML5 ready browsers.
The same way you can run xephem, skychart, ccdciel etc. Just point your browser to IP of your RPi and enter password on login screen (default is astroberry).
The other way you can use it is to connect to it with KStars and Ekos or Skychart. This way you can use your RPi as a compact INDI server (I stick mine to the telescope with double side tape).
I have not developed the plate solving driver yet. However I have already compiled astrometry.net on my RPi 2 and must admit that it works very well. This means that plate solving driver would handle what is needed with no problem on RPi.
For autoguiding you can use almost any CCD as an input for Ekos guiding system. Just configure Guider in your Kstars options, pointing at your CCD. After you connect to it Guiding tab in Ekos will let you control autoguiding system.

Dear team
I've install the distro and looks quite interesting product
Now is there any possibility to set the Kstars geographic position from the astroGPS driver? Automatically or with just one click action ?
Second question, how to update the Indi package (library, Indiserver and drivers) ?

I'm glad you like it.

Setting Kstars geographic location is a one-click action. Just use Set location button and GPS location will be sent to your mount.
The driver assumes your GPS receiver is connected to RPi serial port (/dev/AMA0). Current version also assumes your mount is handled by EQMod driver (subject to change in future versions).

INDI binaries can be updated by regular apt-get procedure (except astroberry binaries, which are not part of official repository). HOWEVER for stability reasons whole filesystem is set to read-only mode. Before any changes to the system you need to remount root filesystem to read-write. To do this run sudo astroberry_rw
If your update or you change any files in /etc or /var directories you need to copy all the changes also to /etc_org and /var_org. Only then the changes will remain persistent after system reboot. After all the changes run sudo astroberry_ro. This will set you root filesystem back to read-only state. After this you are safe to power off your RPi anytime without risk of SD card corruption. I think the procedure will be automated in the final release.

Thanks for the update.

Now have to try with mount connected as I use EQMod driver.
Anyway this is good to know that /var is a readonly directory and that changes have to be copy to /var_org. This is well apreciated to have this SD protection and then do not have to take care for shutting down before swithing off the all system (Mount, camera, and RP!
Good job.

I've some troubles with Astroberry, anyway my opinion is still quite positive.
When I had some other INDI drivers, one function doesn't works! the "Save" configuration. The configuration path doesn't exist! When looking at it, I saw the indiserver is running on root account !! Any special argument to do this?
May I suggest you to change the running account to a "normal" user as astroberry? to solve this issue and secure the distro.
Second issue If I want to use certificate auth with ssh communication (As for example to send an easy shutdown command it doesn't work. I've to change the sshd_config to use the authorized_keys file AND de-activate the StrictModes. Other wise ssh doesn't accept the group access setting on the astroberry's user home diretory.
Could change the setting too in the distro for the astroberry's home directory to be able to keep StrictMode actifs on SSHD server?

I've tested to set the location from the GPS in one click button without success, even if I use EQMod driver with my Skywatcher HEQ-5 Pro mount. Any idea? I'll investigate in the future about this as it should works.

Best regards to all INDI's fan!

Besson, thanks for your feedback. I'm very glad that you like Astroberry.

I'm not sure why you get "Configuration path doesn't exist" error while saving drivers' options. INDI configuration files are located in /root/.indi directory. As soon as you make the filesystem writeable (just run astroberry_rw) you can save settings with no other steps needed. The only case I have problems with is Atik Titan driver. I haven't succeeded with it. The others are just fine. If the problem persists just let me know. I will follow up on this.
Initial release of Astroberry (the first release candidate being still a development version) IS NOT security hardened and yes, indiserver runs on root account. The reason is that there are some problems of running indiserver from regular user account, even though 7624 port is way beyond 1023 reserved for root. You may try to run the indiserver from any regular account (e.g. astroberry) by changing /etc/init.d/indi bootup script (see RUNAS variable) and/or assign non-standard port to it. The distro WILL BE hardened in the final release. As for now you should use it in trusted networks only and not expose the indi service publicly. Additionally, as a security geek I strongly discourage anybody to run indiserver on a public network. I'm not aware of any security tests of the software therefore my next contribution will be for sure to run such tests. I will definitely come back to the forum with my findings.

I will take a look at the ssh configuration. You can access the system authenticating with default astroberry password. If you want to use certificates make sure that you set access right to ~/.ssh folder to 700 and the files located in this folder to 600. Otherwise ssh will not work in strict modes.

When using Astroberry GPS you need to make sure that the GPS coordinates are available to the driver before you send them to the mount. Does the driver successfully read the GPS coordinates from a receiver? If it shows zeros only it does not. If it shows coordinates it does.
Also I noted that Astroberry GPS driver freezes just after connection to GPS, at the very first read attempt from GPS device. Disconnecting the driver and connecting again fixes the issue. Status light for time and GPS should turn green afdter every update (every second for time, every 10 seconds for gps). If it stays yellow just disconnect and connect again. After the coordinates are displayed on the drivers tab you can just click set position button and it should work. Let me know if it does not.

And finally, lots of clear skies!

Thanks a lot for your complete and clear answer.
Yep the setting GPS position works. Like you wrote, some connection issue occurs, but as I understanding that looks fine now.

For the other tips, may be I've to wait for a final release before try to do to my fully customized (TO my hardware) configuration.

May I kindly ask you which IndiIlib version is running on the Astroberry distro? As for one of my driver it doesn’t works correctly on this distro (New driver develop by Jasem and finalized last Sunday). In the same way with which Indilib version the Astroberry drivers are compatible? I've tried to compile it on my raspberry (Ubuntu version) and get compilation error related to virtual functions error!

Maybe it could be great to have to different distribution. An easy one as you've built with apt-get install of INDI for keep it up to date, and a "Free one with full cmake tolls library and use SVN up for 3Parties and Indilib subversion management to be able to use it easier with personnal driver or testing.

Again thanks for this nice project.

Staring regards.

I have just a question, is Astroberry able to run on a odroid-C1 ?
Thank you

@Philippe the distro is based on indllib 1.0 just after it has been released (Apr 2015). This means it does not contain the latest changes to the code.
However, you can update your indilib from the offical repo with apt-get. It should work without problems. Only custom astroberry drivers will not be updated. Just remember to put the filesystem in rw mode first and copy all files from *_rw directories to *_org directories before you set the filesystem back to ro mode and reboot. Otherwise the changes introduced by updates will not be persistent.
I will be updating the drivers to the latest indilib this summer and hopefuly I will fix some bugs too. I'm using Astroberry RC1 in production environment for my observations. So far so good. Im especially glad of Astroberry Focuser, which works flawlessly. Astroberry GPS needs fix for gps connection (we discussed it above) and rewrite of the code responsible for calculating timezone (it does not account for DST adjustment) and setting time to scope (it conflicts with indi client for some reason). After some testing Mosaic needs major reengineering too. It is mount and ccd specific which makes it not portable enough and it's a pain.
And the last but not least - for development I use my own IDE, which includes all dependencies, libraries and sources. It is too "dirty" to get it public but if you want to go for some code development I can share it with you. It's just another img file for 4GB SD card. Drop me a private message if you're interested.

@patdut, I don't think so. The distro is Raspberry Pi specific. It contains RPi bootloader so it will probably not even boot. You can always give it a try and let us know Anyway, if it boots up you can use indiserver with all drivers except astroberry focuser, astroberry gps, astroberry altimu due to GPIO pins are RPi specific (bcm2835).
So I would recommend just vanilla system for odroid-C1, adding indilib official repo or downloading the binary files, install and have lots of fun!

Dear Kaczorek.
Thanks for all these complete information. As for me this is vacation time, I think I'll wait for your improved version from this summer, before really investigate around my issue on Astroberry distro and the FocusLynx driver wrote by Jasem. But sure I'll following this topics to test next update of this lovely distro,
Have good time.

Philippe.

@Patdut: I've just tried once to boot on Odroid-C1 without success, but I didn't investigate about it. Please keep us in touch if you find a work around for that.
Regards