I have a mount - a vixen GP which I upgraded with a synscan upgrade kit. I have put the pass through firmware into the hand controller.
I have a Canon EOS Ra camera, and initially I am using with a canon 400mm lens while I get the software working.
If you have any idea about how I might make this work, I'll try (almost) anything!
The story so far

  1. Started with Astroberry - mount works OK, but camera is not supported by the installed version of libraw (it is a very old version). Having searched around a few people had looked into updating libraw, but the interface has changed and the knock on effects became too complex, so this approach does not seem viable.
  2. Tried with ubuntu install (more up to date version than astroberry build), but end up in the same place as the only arm repos are the same ones backing astroberry
  3. installed indi / kstars on my Fedora laptop (It has to be Fedora as debian etc. do not have the keyboard and other drivers I need). At least the camera is now supported! mount OK and basic camera working, however any attempt to plate solve (with kstars own or with external software) crashes kstars completely and there is nothing useful in any log file.
  4. Ran kstars from shell - kstars is crashing on a segfault immediately after reporting plate has solved. Pretty certain it isn't a resource problem as laptop has 16Gb ram and a ryzen 5800h cpu
  5. Thought I would try driving indi from python to see if I could find where the problem is, but can't install the python wrapper as there is a version conflict. Known unresolved bug
  6. Resurected old laptop and built ubuntu 20.04 on it as ubuntu seems to be the distro with best support on the indi website. Installed OK, but kstars / ekos come up with no icons making it impossible to use (well certainly for a noob)
  7. Found a fix for the icons problem, but then just ran into the segfault problem again
  8. Decided to try just running indiserver on raspberry pi and eqmodgui on my laptop (there doesn't appear to be an arm version built and with all the old baselines and versioning problems I'd already experienced, I didn't fancy trying a source build. But eqmodgui tries to open the connection to the server (the server sees the connect, then eqmodgui just sits there and eventually says failed to connect and gives up.
  9. Oh somewhere along the way I tried ccdciel as well, but that clearly needs way more resource than a 4Gb Raspberry pi has, cos it is mind numbingly slow to respond to any user input
No idea what I can do now other than find an old windows laptop and try ASCOM based software.
Or put back the standard firmware into the synscan handset and do it like it's 1990 again.

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