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

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

Astrotrac 360 INDI Driver documentation development

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No problem

Below/above is the 'short' version with little reference to other devices

Its a device that needs some detail to setup correctly unfortunately.

You can ignore the Polar Alignment component if you want but some of it is relevant

The rest is pretty important to know I think
Last edit: 2 years 6 months ago by Abdi. Reason: Location of previous post
2 years 6 months ago #75938

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Hi guys,

I went and got the Brostrend antenna mentioned above. I was able to install the driver, with some difficulty at first buy I managed to do it in the end. I think it is working but I am not really sure. Is there a way to see if it is actually working?
I will try it with the astrotrac as soon as I can. Hopefully the connection will then be a lot more stable as I have had problems with that as well.
I recently talked to Richard to see if there will be goto available for the mount any time soon via his own web interface or even directly via Skysafari, which by the way I cannot seem to connect via Stellarmate for some reason ( from my Ipad). I get the impression that I have a version that does not work for that. Anybody have any idea?
Anyway Richard said that he didn't have any plans to implement that any time soon but that anybody with the proper coding skills could do it as it is open source software that can be expanded beyond the basic capability that is there now. Would something like that be possible, since a lot of knowhow has gone into this driver that is now available? Or is that something completely different? I unfortunately do not have those skills or I would definitely give it a shot.
Also are any of you talking to the people behind Asiair for the incorporation of this driver in their software?

Thanks,

Peter
2 years 5 months ago #76481

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Hello Gents,

I could use some help here. I tried to use my StellarMate again to connect to the Astrotrac. It connected fine, no problem there. It is the parking and unparking that does not seem to work. When I first connect, the mount is immediately unparked and tracking. I can turn tracking off, that works. I can move in all axis with motion control and I can give a goto command in Kstars. When I try to park the mount however it only parks the RA drive and not the Dec drive. It just stays where it is. Encoders are working normal. I tried via the regular Astrotrac interface as well as in the driver is show the different encoder positions. I did update all my drivers before I started, however the Astrotrac version still is on version 1.0 and interface 5. Don’t know if that is correct.
Hope somebody can help me troubleshoot this.

Thanks,

Peter
1 year 11 months ago #82477

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Happens to me sometimes but doesn’t happen at other times. Not a showstopper.

On the version, even mine shows 1.0 even though I have updated the drivers.

Sameer
1 year 11 months ago #82478

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Thanks Sameer, strange, but I’ll see if I can get it to work under the stars this week.
I was thinking that maybe things would get confused if it didn’t respond to those commands.

Cheers,

Peter
1 year 11 months ago #82479

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Looks like it is not bothered by the park and unpark commands not working properly indeed. Seems that every time I make some kind of command that involves the dec drive it shows a timeout serial error, even though it seems to be doing what it is supposed to do. I also use an external dongle to connect StellarMate to the mount and that seems to work ok, but still getting a lot of those timeout errors.
1 year 11 months ago #82492

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The serial times out errors are a problem.

I found that using a high gain external wifi dongle on the stellarmate via one of its usb 2 ports is the best bet with regards to minimising the errors. The antenna has to be setup just so and I’ve posted about my setup before. I feel that there must be some interference with the aluminium body of the mount and the stellarmate despite Astrotrac saying there shouldn’t be. I briefly discussed with Colin who wrote the theskyx drivers and he noticed frequent wifi issues even and timeout issues even when using a windows laptop.

Once you get a run of serial timeout errors its more likely to keep happening in which case I suggest disconnecting mount from ekos/k stars and reconnecting it. Also whilst the mount is doing slews etc avoid lookout at the taskbar of the stellarmate. I noticed everytime I hovered and pressed over the taskbar for example to check the network connection strength etc a serial timeout error would be triggered. And if I didn’t stop doing it it kept happening and in my view it “corrupts” the session so disconnect and reconnect renews the setting. This is whilst using vnc to connect to it from my mac.

Now no one seems to know why that error happens for sure but this is what I have found. On its own the wifi broadcast from the mount seems robust it’s just a matter of the other device consistently picking it up or not.

When I spoke to Richard from astrotrac he stated that during testing the wifi connection were tested for days at a time to check data transmission and integrity and apparently was ok. But obviously the same error happens on both the skyx driver and also this indi driver.

Maybe you all might have an idea.

But short of it is if use high gain antenna as desribed above and dont play around in the stellarmate /os taskbar outside of ekos/kstars it seems not to have any errors.
1 year 11 months ago #82498

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My observations are consistent with your findings. The serial error is definitely linked to interference. Happened to me indoors while testing the driver. Less often outside. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much sky time with the mount in the last few months.
1 year 11 months ago #82499

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And additionally apparently its not best practice to be connected to mount via the ui and a web browser AND external control software such as stellarmate or theskyx.

So you can get into the Ui first via web browser setup the mount /or in my case force the dec to be a dec /other settings/ then close that connection/refresh browser, then connect to the mount via ekos/kstars.

So
Turn on mount without turning on stellarmate
setup mount via web browser as required
close browser
turn on stellarmate ensure antenna is best positioned minimise usb 3 interference
connect to mount and gear from ekos/kstars
avoid using the stellarmate os taskbar once connected

setup
1 year 11 months ago #82500

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You and me both it would seem.
1 year 11 months ago #82501

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I will try again tonight and take the mount outside, to see if that makes a difference. I also use the Brostrend dongle, but I will try different ways to connect to the mount to see if it makes a difference. I’ll try different connections, including a small repeater to see if that makes a difference.
How do you guys orient the external Antenna of the dongle, can’t remember reading anything about that?
1 year 11 months ago #82506

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I have the mount outside now. I connect exactly as instructed above and it connects fine. Stellarmate is connected to the mount via the Brostrend dongle and it shows a solid connection.
At first connection to the mount, the driver shows that tracking is off and the mount is unparked. That is correct the tracking is off, in motion control no movement is shown.
First goto to a star in the east works fine no serial read error. I perform a sync, still no issue at all. Goto a star in the west causes a meridian flip and works perfect, but I get serial read error: timeout error, every 30 seconds or so and it ends with a serial read error:read overflow.
Next I select park. Immediately I get a Mount parking failed, several timeout errors again and the mount only moves the RA axis to the home position.
Still in the main control window of the driver I now tell the dec drive to go to declination 90 degrees and it moves there without an issue.
To me it seems that something goes wrong with the park command, why is it not parking the dec drive ( a move command to 90 degrees dec works fine).
Also after it is parked with tracking turned off I push unpark and I get a message that the mount is already unparked, the dot in front of Park/unpark is white when I do that , but turns red immediately when I tell it to park, even though it does move the RA drive correctly.
It does not look like any of the timeout messages cause any wrong behavior though, except when parking.
Manual motion controls work fine as well but tend to throw a few timeout errors some seconds after the commands are executed.
Also interesting. In motion control the is an encoder tab. When I try to set 0 on both hour angel and declination, it also only moves the RA drive but not the dec drive and the dot in front of it turns red, so similar behavior as the Park command. So apparently I can command the dec drive to go to a certain declination but it does not react to a command to go to a certain encoder position, does that seem correct? I don't know if there is a difference in commands between those two, but I assume there are. It now just sits outside with tracking off and ever so often it throws a timeout error, about once or twice a minute for a few minutes now. When I turn tracking on it throws both timeout errors as well as read overflow.
So at least in my case, the dec drive does react to specific declination commands, but not to encoder commands. Via the mounts interface the dec encoder shows 100%

Hope this helps to troubleshoot what is happening.
1 year 11 months ago #82523

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