A few weeks ago I decided I would go down the route of controlling my mount etc using a raspberry Pi with Stellarmate OS. Clear nights have been rare and when one did occur on Thursday, I went out with the simple ambition of photographing M42. It was nothing but frustrating. One I finally got polar aligned I thought I would slew to roughly align the scope and use plate solving to properly align. The mount slewed to somewhere located beneath the ground i.e. completely the wrong way.

I have spent most of this afternoon trying fault find. The mount consistently slews the wrong way. It also throws other problems up like showing the scope position as below the horizon at times, or tells me that when when slewing to an object that is obviously above the horizon, that it cannot slew there because it is above the horizon. The scope is parked and I have also updated the parked position to current when in a parked state.

To sanity check, I connected the mount to my Windows Tablet which I used previously. The cope slews correctly when using CdC under Ascom.

I have fitted a RTC module from the Pi Store and it is showing the correct time.

Looking at the INDI control panel, the latitude is correct but the longitude sometimes shows 357:21:01:0 - I am in Bristol UK so clearly nonsense. This is despite setting my location in Kstars as my home town. Sometimes it shows location as 0 for both lat and long. Also when the mount is pointing at north (which it sometimes shows it is in kstars) alignment in the INDI control panel shows a RA and DEC that does not correspond with the RA and DEC of where it says it is pointing.

When slewing to a target I have clicked on in Kstars and issued a go to command for it does not even slew in the direction of the target that I have marked.

All of this is incredibly frustrating, and I am wondering if there is any actual solution to it or whether I am better just going back to a Windows machine. Any advice would be gratefully receieved....

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