Greetings! And thank you for all the effort going in to a linux based astronomy solution!

I'm in the process of migrating my workflows from an old Windows XP laptop (I know!) to a slightly newer Ubuntu based one and found INDI but am having no end of problems

The old system is IBM Thinkpad X41 / ASCOM / EQMOD / Stellarium / Firecapture / Astrostakkert etc and all works as expected with my AZ-EQ6 mount and ZWO ASI462MC camera (amongst others).

The new system is IBM Thinkpad T410i running Ubuntu 20.04LTS with INDI / KSTARS (latest stable as of 7/30)

Problem #1 is the mount. I'm selecting EQMOD as the Telescope type and choosing the correct USB port (/dev/ttyUSB1) and connecting to the hand controller as I always do in PC DIRECT mode. I know this isn't ideal, but it has always worked reliably for me in windows at least. Connection fails 80% of the time, often with 'another process is using /dev/ttyUSB1'. I have now used udev to force the USB connection to always be /dev/ttyUSB.EQM which seems to make this a little more reliable, but it won't hold a connection for more than 30 seconds - it connects, I see the mount information, and then when KSTARS syncs the date and time and place, it seems that upsets the mount and it drops the connection. I've never been able to slew the scope or see where KSTARS thinks it is pointing.

QUESTION: Is anyone else using PC-DIRECT (ie connecting to the handset) on an AZ-EQ6 with KSTARS successfully? Any clues what I'm doing wrong? I tried turning on debug logs but that didn't seem to change anything which seemed odd.

Problem #2 is the camera. All I get is CCD error (16) from the ZWO driver. The camera works just fine on the same laptop with Firecapture

QUESTION: Is the ASI 462MC (new camera) supported by the INDI driver?

Seems like lots of folks are using this all successfully, so it must be something my end, but as a technical bod I'm finding it frustrating I haven't been able to make it work yet.

Thanks for any clues ...

Roger

Answer ONE: If you use the hand controller on a SkyWatcher mount then you need to select the SynScan driver and you may need to select the SybnScan Legacy driver (if it still exists, I haven't used it in a LONG time). The EQMOD driver only works if you use an EQDir cable to connect the mount directly to a PC/laptop without using the hand controller.

Answer TWO: The latest version of KStars comes with the latest version of the ZWO drivers so the camera should work. I don't own an ASI462MC camera, though, so I cannot test and verify this. Perhaps you should ask this on the ZWO forum if nobody can verify this here.


HTH, Wouter

PC-Direct does not work reliably with EQMod. Better get EQDir cable .

AFAIK, all ZWO cameras should work fine. Everything installed from the official PPA?

Thanks, I originally installed latest stable from the instructions at indilib.org/get-indi/download-ubuntu.html which gave me kstars 3.4.1. This morning I've used kstars-bleeding and now have 3.4.3

I launch kstars, goto tools -> devices and then run service on the ZWO CCD option. In the log window I get this;

When I launch the INDI control panel I see a tab for ZWO CCX xU, the driver is listed as exec indi_asi_ccd version 7 interface 6

When I click on connect, I get;
FWIW the ASI462MC is the latest camera from ZWO, but it's working fine with Firecapture etc which hasn't made any special consideration for it, so I don't think it's that.

Is there a command line way I can try any tests of the camera?