Hello everyone,

Before I file a bug report, I wanted to check if anyone has successfully used the Ekos internal guider with the ZWO AM5 in pulse mode. I'm able to use the AM5 with the Ekos internal guider & ST4 but not with pulse mode control. When I try a calibration run, RA outward drift shows the green dots moving out along the an X or Y axis as it should, but the RA inward drift doesn't reverse direction. The white dots continue moving out along the axis. ST4 calibration works correctly.

I'm aware of needing to change the Guide selection in the Optic Train to "ZWO AM5" and I've double checked the INDI control panel for the AM5 under the Options tab to make sure Pulse Mode is ON/Enabled.

I'm on Linux Mint and updated Kstars/INDI yesterday (Kstars 3.6.3 stable, INDI library 2.0.1)

I have verbose Kstars & INDI log files to include with my bug report but maybe this is not an indilib.org problem and I need to file the bug report with ZWO since they provide the INDI driver (I think?) ?

Thanks for reading!

Do you see :Mgx commands in the log where x could be any direction n,w,e,w? If yes, then you would know at least the pulse commands are getting sent to the mount. They're follow by a value in millisecond for the pulse duration.

Thank you for the quick response, Jasem.

I couldn't find any :Mg[n,s,e,w] commands in the logs. But there are :Me# and :Mw# commands like this one:

[2023-04-04T21:09:22.610 PDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO AM5 : "[SCOPE] <MoveTo> "
[2023-04-04T21:09:22.610 PDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO AM5 : "[SCOPE] CMD <:Me#> "
[2023-04-04T21:09:22.610 PDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO AM5 : "[DEBUG] Moving toward East. "
[2023-04-04T21:09:22.793 PDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Mount status changed from "Tracking" to "Moving E"

I've attached an extract from the Kstars debug log (log_extract.txt) containing the entries where calibration goes from RA drifting forward (west) to RA drifting reverse (east)

If CMD <:GR#> is the command to retrieve the mount's RA position, then you can see in the log extract that the RA continues to increase even after the :Me# command.

hmmm is Use Pulses property set to disabled? Please check, it should be enabled by default.

Thanks, Jasem. The pulse property in the AM5 INDI control panel is enabled. I also posted this question on the Cloudy Nights forum. A member suggested I try issuing the pulse commands through the INDI control panel and I'll try that but it's looking like ZWO didn't implement pulse mode correctly so I'll post this bug on their forum later this week.

I got it working! I had to disable pulse mode and then re-enable it in the INDI control panel for the AM5 (Options tab). Before testing Ekos calibration after toggling pulse mode off+on, I also sent a few zero length pulses using the Guide tab in the INDI control panel but that may not be necessary.