I think I've found the source of the issues and it was related to... USB cables and, probably, interference! The mount works like a charm now. I have a RPi 4B and, currently, I use all of the USB ports. To one of the ports I connect the ATIK CCD and if I use a USB 3.0|1 cable, I immediately get issues. I suspect that there are some interference going on between the ports. I didn't think that could be the case as I tried everything, shutting down all devices until only the mount was switched on, but, alas, the problem remained. Switching the CCD USB 3.0|1 cable to a v2 solved the problem immediately.

Lesson learned? I need to get a powered USB hub which will probably solve the issue as I assume they're probably better shielded.

Phew, I really love my Zero so happy camper now!

Cheers


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Hi!

I'm running a Raspberry PI4B with Astroberry v2.0.4 and Indilib v1.9.7. Connected I have:
- Avalon Zero Obs with StarGo connected over USB (Using the Indilib StarGo driver)
- Atik Horizon II
- QHY CCD5LII

Recently my mount started to behave erratic and says "Could not get the motor status from mount (err: -4)" or something like that. I've checked the logs and that is the only error reported. This usually shows after 3-4 and sometimes after up to 7 slews. After that the mount becomes very slow in its responses and it fails to report back the position to EKOS thus not updating the scope position in KStars. I can see that Ekos/Indilib sends :34# and then waits for 2 seconds which results in:

- Failed to receive full reponse: Timeout error. (Return code: -4)
- Failed to parse motor state response ''.
- Failed to parse motor state. Retrying...

And this goes on and on...

I've tried three different Avalon FW:s
- 6.20SP6
- 6.56B2
- 7.?

All of them behave in the same way. Anybody else having the same behavior?

Cheers

Hi Peter,

I also have an Avalon M-Zero OBS running with the setup below, but I haven't observed the behaviour you have observed with your setup. Next time I power up my system, I will try to reproduce your situation and report back to you. Did you perform plate solving between each slew?

Setup:
- Avalon M-Zero OBS with FW 6.20 (not sure about the SP level) over USB
- ODroid N2
- Ubuntu Mate 20.04 LTS
- ZWO ASI1600MM Pro + EFW
- ZWO ASI290MM (guide)

Hi Gilles!

Thanks for chiming in! I think I found the issue and it had nothing to do with the mount and I've updated my post to reflect this.

The mount is just fine. Phew

Cheers

Hi Peter
I used to have very strange behaviors and errors with my attached devices from time to time. After a few frustrating nights I decided to replace all my USB cables with high quality ones and also I bought the Powerbox from Pegasus and since then these problems all disappeared.
Thomas

Hi Thomas!

The cables are good quality BUT I'll definitely visit the Pegasus store after this "incident" Very annoying indeed but now my Avalon is purring like a cat so I'm a happy camper!

Cheers