Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Wanderer astro' in the forum. 4 weeks ago

Everything working great on my dev box, waiting for some decent weather to get it out to the observatory and try it under the stars. Thanks!

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Wanderer astro' in the forum. 4 weeks ago

Cool! Is there a way to update KStars as well?

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Wanderer astro' in the forum. 4 weeks ago

The avrdude update worked great on my RPi400.

I downloaded nou's astrosoft software to rebuild INDI and KStars with the nightly build, it's easy and it works. Just do the following:

sudo apt install git
cd ..
git clone gitea.nouspiro.space/nou/astro-soft-build
cd astro-soft-build
./install-dependencies.sh
./build-soft-latest.sh

Go for a liesurely coffee, read a novel etc. and it'll finish eventually :)

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Wanderer astro' in the forum. 1 month ago

Thanks for the Linux command line! I'm looking for the WandererAstro Lite V2 driver and Frank tells me it's a few days away.

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Gord Tulloch created a new topic ' Stellarmate down?' in the forum. 2 months ago

Hi there:

I just updated my IOS version of the Stellarmate app and when it tried to connect to Stellarmate.com it failed with a |getaddrinfo: ENOTFOUND www.stellarmate.com. This is a bit wierd since it would seem to be a DNS issue vs the server actually being down. Is this the same for everyone or perhaps there's an upstream DNS issue thats preventing resolution for me?

Regards,
Gord

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Ekos Planetary Imaging' in the forum. 2 months ago

I heard from her (my apologies for misgendering you Nicola!) who indicated she didn't intend to either monetize nor open source DMXCapture.

As a sometime planetary imager, I tend to agree with Axel that adding real planetary imaging to the already overly complex EKOS UI seems to be wasted effort, versus perhaps a UI update (although honestly I find the EKOS UI perfectly fine versus trying to cram everything on a single screen) or adding livestacking to the desktop interface (right now I livestack with ASTAP which is also fine but a hassle with filters and calibration etc.) There are lots of excellent planetary imaging packages out there including FireCapture and AstroDMX so it's not like we don't have something. Honestly, planetary imaging is so different than DSO imaging (finicky to position the planet on the sensor for example) that right now I don't do planets because it's a hassle to dismantle my DSO rig and assembly a planetary rig with different filters, ADC, Barlow etc.)

That being said to meet the OP requirement it just sounds like the ability to capture a SER file instead of a FITS is a pretty simple requirement that won't require much change. From what I can tell there just needs to be a change to the Capture tab to include SER in the Format field instead of FITS, 8 or 16-bit. I guess there would need to be a duration field as well since the exposure would be needed.

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Ekos Planetary Imaging' in the forum. 2 months ago

I'm shocked to say you're right, it's not open source. I thought it was - certainly it doesn't look like Nicola has tried to monetize the software so wonder why he hasn't open sourced it?

I'll ask him...

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Gord Tulloch replied to the topic 'Ekos Planetary Imaging' in the forum. 2 months ago

This seems to be a rather significant effort when AstroDMX Capture (www.astrodmx-capture.org.uk/) as of version 2.0.2, support now includes INDI mount, camera, focuser and filter wheels. Also, EKOS is pretty complicated as is?

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Thanks Aaron I think perhaps using polar coords converted from the desired altaz might be more generic anyway, so I'll do that.

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Hi there - I think I know the answer to this but thought I'd confirm - can you specify altaz coordinates in PyIndi and have the telescope slew to them? I tried the following:

# Set the desired coordinates
telescope_altaz=device_telescope.getNumber("HORIZONTAL_COORD")
while not(telescope_altaz):
time.sleep(0.5)
telescope_altaz=device_telescope.getNumber("HORIZONTAL_COORD")
telescope_altaz[0].value=startAltAz
telescope_altaz[1].value=startAltAz
indiclient.sendNewNumber(telescope_altaz)

# and wait for the scope has finished moving
while (telescope_altaz.getState()==PyIndi.IPS_BUSY):
print("Scope Moving ", telescope_altaz[0].value, telescope_altaz[1].value)
time.sleep(2)

But the scope doesn't move. So I imagine not - the KStars client does slew to Altaz coords for automated flats. or is that just calculating a RA and DEC based on the AltAz coords desired and slews to that? I know I've got good connections and stuff since I can park and unpark the scope but this isn't working for me. Any input appreciated thanks!

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I'm in the same boat with a rotator I just got, except they claimed they had an INDI driver, but it didn't work. THey're working on one, but in the meantime I'm using a simple Python script to operate the rotator. I used the free Device Monitoring Studio from www.hhdsoftware.com to sniff out the protocol under ASCOM then wrote a Python script to operate the rotator. Once you you that working you would still need to build the INDI driver but at least you'd start out knowing the protocol side of things works. Good luck!

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