My StellarMate arrived two weeks ago. We've had two weeks of terrible weather. While waiting for nice weather, I connected my Macbook laptop computer to my new StellarMate many times. The connection was simple. Just give power to the StellarMate and then look for it in the list of Wifi networks on my Macbook.
I'd click on stellarmate and all was good. I could connect my cameras and other things. But, the weather was bad so before tonight, I was unable to actually roll my telescope out from my garage and actually do a polar alignment and start taking real astrophotos. Tonight we have clear skies. So, I rolled the mount out from my garage. I plugged in my AC power cord. I looked to see stellarmate as a wifi option on my Macbook. IT'S NOT THERE. I have no idea why it's not showing up. I rolled the telescope back into the garage. It still doesn't appear. I unplugged and replugged the power cord several times. I rebooted my Macbook. I've tried many many things. And, it's still not showing up. I really hope someone can help me figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.

When you power it up, do you see the red led blinking intermixed with green led (indicating it's booting up)? After a few minutes, do you see a minor blip of green suggesting it's fully up? Have you tried an ethernet cable for direct connect between your PC and the SM? Does your phone see the network hotspot? Is your SD card fully pushed into it's slot? I think the first move might be to find an ethernet cable for direct connect. Next might be to check the phone hotspot....

Yes, the red led blinks intermixed with some green blinking. After a minute or so, the blinking stops and it's just a solid red light. I tried connecting the HDMI cable to my computer. I saw nothing. My phone does not see any stellarmate hotspot. Nor does my wife's computer. Just now I checked to see if the SD card was fully inserted. It seemed like it was. But, just to make sure, I pulled it out and then slid it back in. When I slid it in it somehow went all the way inside the StellarMate. I don't know how to get it back out. When I shake the StellarMate, I hear it bouncing around inside. Yikes. What do I do now?

I was able to figure out how to remove the white top and the two white side pieces from the StellarMate. That gave me some access to the circuit board. I giggled it a little bit and was able to get the SD card out. I've put the white pieces back on and I carefully reinstalled the SD card properly in its slot. I then plugged the power cord back in. I get the red blinking light with lots of green blinks. After a minute or two the blinking stops and it's just a nice solid red. But, the hotspot is still not showing up a a wifi network that I can connect to.

PS. I am at the moment unable to check to see if an ethernet cable would work. I have such a cable but I don't have here at home an adapter to connect an ethernet cable to my Macbook. I might have one in my office. I can check that out on Monday.

When it was last working, did you by chance set the device to "Infrastructure mode" and map your device to connect to your home network? If not, you should see the wireless hotspot show up on http://10.250.250.1:8624. You might also want to run the equivalent of an ipconfig command on the Mac (sorry, I'm a PC guy). That will tell you the IP addresses that are in play on your network. It might give you a clue on what address to try. I think once you have an ethernet cable direct connected, the hotspot will disable and you should see the device show up on www.stellarmate.local/#/home (web manager). FYI, the red and green intermixed blinking is normal, and the red shortly afterwards is also normal (on occasion, you should still see a brief flash of green too....that's normal). I suspect the device is up, but now you have to figure out how to reach it. The direct connect seems like your best bet since you aren't seeing the hotspot. Ah...one last thought. You by chance didn't plug in any USB 3 cables did you? I would unplug all USB cables and try again. USB3 on Pi4-4GB is flaky. If you unplug your equip and try again, your hotspot might come back.

In case it wasn't obvious, if you unplug all USB devices and reboot, you'll need to wait for 1-2 minutes before giving up. The hotspot can sometimes be a bit slow coming back (especially if the device was rudely shutdown previously).

It was last working yesterday morning (about 18 hours ago). During that connection, the only thing I did was add astrometry to the auxiliary connections in the Ekos tool so that I would be able to do a polar alignment later in the evening.

I have entered http://10.250.250.1:8624 into both Google Chrome and into Safari. I get "Can't Open The Page, Server not Found". I also downloaded and installed VNC Connect. In that app, I entered 10.250.250.1:8624 and I get a window that says "Connecting to 10.250.250.1:8624". But, the connection is never made. The command "arp -a" shows ip addresses available to my computer. I get 10.0.0.1. It's called "en0 ifscope". That's just the router for our xFinity modem.

All USB cables are unplugged (and I only have USB2 cables, not USB3).

All USB devices are unplugged. I've rebooted and waited several minutes many times since this problem started 10 hours ago.

I located an Ethernet-to-USB3 adapter, so now I am able to connect my Macbook laptop computer to the StellarMate. I downloaded VNC Connect. When I enter the IP address (10.255.255.10) in VNC, it recognizes that address and asks me for the login id and password. I know the login id, but somehow I didn't keep a record of the password. I think I let my Macbook create a random password and then had that password automatically stored for when I access the HotSpot. Anyway, I don't know my password and I don't know how to reset it. Any help on how to do that would be greatly appreciated.

vanderbei - you can use your Keychain app on your Mac to access the stored password.

Try using http://10.250.250.1:6080/vnc.html for the Hotpsot - that is the IP I've always used