Hi guys,

Glad you guys are working on this. I have to say that I had no problems at all connecting the StellarMate to my mount. Moving the mount around and even goto commands seemed to work, even though I had no way of aligning it, so I am not sure if any of it was accurate. I have tried to use StellarMate to connect my ZWO cameras and that was a bit more difficult as it seemed to loose connection to them quite often which would make an imaging session quite frustrating.
Normally I use an ASIAIR which has been working perfectly for me and much more reliable for some reason. I hope that the Astrotrac driver becomes available soon for the ASIAIR, that would be perfect. I will do some more testing this week, which unfortunately will have to be indoors due to our terrible weather here in the Netherlands. Staying tuned for your results as well. I am assuming I can update the driver through the StellarMate update process?

Thanks,

Peter

Yes, you can also use the beta channel: stellarmate.com/support.html?view=kb&kbartid=5

Alignment of the mount is done via Plate Solving, so just capture and solve. I will test tonight the INDI::Alignment Subsystem yet again (which is used in AstroTrac among other drivers) to see how it fairs compared to EQMod Alignment system (which works fairly well).

Nice to meet you Peter. I have had no issues connecting the ZWO cameras to Ekos. Glad to hear you are getting some traction with ZWO on the AsiAir pro driver for the Astrotrac. Jasem is very close to making the Astrotrac driver work fully. As of now I use Stellarmate on the RPi4 to connect to the mount via WiFi and I use a wired Ethernet connection from the Pi to the home router. Control everything using Ekos/Kstars on my Mac inside the house

Yesterday I fully tested INDI::Alignment subsystem with the EQMod driver. Overall it went smoothly but I had to fix a couple of bugs, so the latest beta of the driver should be good to go for plate solving testing now. I believe the Alignment system from EQMod driver should probably be adopted unto INDI::Alignment subsystem as a plugin since it provides superior results in nearest-point mode at least (N-star has a few issues).

What is the current version of the driver. Mine still shows 1.0 even though both stable and beta versions have been updated. I can still just slew the mount and perform a goto.
Unfortunately still waiting for some clear skies in our terrible Northern Europe weather.

Hi all,

last two night I had somewhat clear skies, enough to do some experiments. First night was one big frustration as I could not keep a connection to StellarMate no matter what I did, but tonight things were a bit better. I used a small repeater and connected StellarMate with a network cable to the repeater. The repeater connected to Astrotrac via WiFi. Anyway, much more stable this time although not perfect. First I tried the polar alignment routine and it worked perfectly! It moved the mount correctly and after running it a few times I got it to within just a few minutes of the pole. So far so good. Next I wanted to try some goto’s and never got it to work. I noticed in the app that it was constantly telling me the scope would be sitting east of the pier while pointing west, while it was the other way around or vice versa. I could not change it in the setting. Capture and solve worked, but it did not sync to the mount. I tried manually pointing it and then sync, but that didn’t work either. I suspect I am doing something wrong, but I cannot figure out what. I looked in all the settings and it seemed I could feed it some coordinates however the side of the pier it was on I could not change. Any pointers on how I should go about this? Should I have it in a certain position before I connect to it, to initialize it? I don’t know. Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Peter

For platesolving, please test the "Nearest" plugin. go to the INDI Control Panel --> AstroTrac --> Alignment --> then select the nearest plugin.

Maybe this should become the new default plugin, but it's new and requires more testing.

Dear Peter,
Have been testing the driver with Jasem. Have had similar issues to yours. I was out of town for a few days and got to test the Nearest Math plug in only once for a few minutes before clouds came in.

Jasem,
It works on the first slew but then same issues as before - iteration gets stuck or it goes off. If I use differential solving, it works perfectly every time (centers target) but shows large error (which is not true) and doesn’t sync even if I try to sync manually in Kstars.

Let me get a good dark night for some extensive testing and I will report back.

Sameer

Hi Sameer and Jasem,

Great you guys are working on this. Would be an awesome addition to this mount. I changed to 'the nearest plugin" , so I will hopefully be able to try that out tonight.
Still have a few questions though. When I look at my Astrotrac driver, it shows me version 1.0 and interface 5.  Is that correct? I tried updating both stable and beta and I seem to remember I saw interface 8 in there before. Not even sure if the Stellarmate stays in beta when I switch channels, because when going back to device is often shows stable again regardless of the fact that I switched.
Anyway I hope to be able to give it a shot again tonight and be able to report back here.

cheers,

Peter

Allright guys, I just came in from a few hours of testing. My connection seems more stable than before now, allthough occasionaly I still loose my connection to Stellarmate and I was sitting right next to it with my Ipad, but most the time it was just slight inconvenience.
I started with autofocus, which did not work to well as it made the application crash several times, but that was maybe because I was not on the stable version now. Polar alignment worked really well.
After the polar alignment I made the mount perform a goto to Altair, which was sitting low in and some degrees east of the meridian. The goto worked surprisingly well and when it was done I'd say it was about 1 degree of Altair. I tried solving and syncing but while the solving did work, it did not sync the mount because it still thought is was looking at Altair. Also the Indi panel said the scope was east pointing west while it was the other way around. I than did a goto to Deneb, also still east of the meridian and it pointed to it with about the same offset. Again Solving and Syncing did not work. I then did a goto to Mizar, which was in the west, because I wanted to see if it would do a meridian flip, and it did not, it ran the scope far below the counterweight. I stopped it and did a goto to Polaris which worked great. From there to Mizar did work fine even though again the driver said it was west pointing east, which was not correct. From there on out all goto's worked fine and it did perform the meridian flips correctly after that, which was a bit puzzling.
So goto's seem to work and generally in the right direction. I am not 100% sure about the meridian crossings. And Solving/ syncing did not seem to work. I also manually pointed to the correct position once and tried to manually sync and that did not work either. A subsequent goto would end with the same offset as before.
Hope that helps!

Peter

Hi

I thought plate solving was working, for me, but when I was using the polar alignment routine, after the first of 3 images used in the process, the mount slews to the next area based on target rotation (30 degrees to the west as set in the alignment panel) however it seems to continue slewing beyond 30 degrees and wont stop and I had to unplug the mount to get it to stop. Restart everything works ok until I try the alignment again. I didn’t check whether the plate-solve showed correct coordinates but I did note that the polar alignment error was huge despite being roughly aligned. I wonder if it was not correctly registering the solve. But that wouldn’t explain why it was slewing essentially non stop.

Anyone else have the problem 

Alright, I need to check this. I verified nearest algorithm actually works, so this is perhaps an issue with the mount driver itself.