I am writing this to give feedback on my experience of using Stellarmate. After using Stellarmate for over a year, I have finally decided to move on to a windows mini PC setup because I faced too many problems. I hope that some of these are taken into consideration, as I would very much like Stellarmate to succeed. It has many advantages over its competitors, but sadly my experience has been that they are potential advantages, marred by the constant problems that I have faced.
I installed Stellarmate OS on a raspberry PI 4 with 4G RAM. I chose Stellarmate primarily because I was drawn to the concept of controlling my gear and doing EAA from indoors. I am not really interested in astrophotography. The live stacking was the feature that pulled me in. I was, and am still a beginner to EAA and astrophotography. My equipment is as follows:
1. Mounts I used: Explore Scientific iExos 100, Skywatcher EQM 35. I still have the latter mount, and am trying a new one, Skywatcher Az-Gti in Alt-az mode. I have not tried this with Stellarmate.
2. Telescopes: Skywatcher 72mm ED, Celestron C6 with f6.3 and f3.3 reducers.
3. Software setups I tried: VNC from windows laptop to RPI, Stellarmate app on Android, KStars/Ekos running on Windows connecting to the RPI
4. Cameras: PlayerOne Neptune C, ZWO ASI 120MM for guiding
Features I loved the most:
1. The indi drivers worked flawlessly. I never had to do a thing, once I knew which ones to select.
2. Ekos bundles imaging, platesolving and goto all in one. There is no replacement to this on Windows.
3. There is a dedicated app to Stellarmate. This is what separates it from Astroberry, and makes it a competitor to ASIAir.
What made me leave:
1. General software/usability problems: The wireless connection to the Rpi would drop unpredictably (the mount was connected to Rpi by wire, the Rpi was connected to home Wifi). This would happen unpredictably, sometimes in the middle of a session. Then I would have trouble connecting to it again, and unpredictably it would eventually work. This was very frustrating, especially for users like me who are new to EAA. I eventually got tired of reading forums trying to find out how other users fixed these issues.
2. The live stacking feature did not improve: it did the basics correctly. But even the basic controls of adjusting the histogram are not there. The sliders that are there, seem to be about adjusting the image properties like saturation, background, etc. I don't really know what they do, or whether they correspond to histogram adjustment in any way.
I do not know if the live stacking uses darks and flats. I need the flats to work because my telescope gets dew, and then dust motes are very visible on every stacked image. I asked on the forum here, but never got any answer.
This EAA feature should improve. KStars/Ekos supports much more equipment than ASIAir. But Cloudy nights is full of users of Stellarmate moving on to ASIAir for reasons of stability, and the stacking not as developed or smooth as ASIAir.
3. Stellarmate seems to be going in the direction of astrophotography more than EAA. Newer features that I see seem to be targeting users with observatories, multiple equipment and complicated workflows. A good example of this is optical trains. I can see how this would be useful for someone who has multiple setups. But for a user like me, it only added complications. I was never able to make it work correctly on the Android app. I tried adding my telescope with original and reduced focal lengths, added reducers separately, etc. But either it would not recognize the setup, or the platesolving would fail. This was the final experience that made me quit, because this feature broke the thing for me that had been working reliably all along (trying out different OTAs, and platesolving just working). This OS and app update also corrupted my Stellarmate installation, so I had to flash and reinstall just to get KStars and Ekos back.
Targeting astrophotographers is fine. But it seems to me that by offering an app, supporting live stacking, Stellarmate was trying to attract users from the EAA community. For some reason it seems that focus has shifted away from it, judging from new features and recent fixes. I have been on Cloudy Nights forums with many other users who have largely the same (small) set of struggles with Stellarmate (instability of the setup, random crashes, live stacking working but not fleshed out, live stacking not having intuitive controls), and the feeling is that these items were lower priority than newer features.
I want to reiterate how much I liked what Stellarmate promised. I'm on Windows now, and I miss the one-stop software experience that KStars/Ekos offered on my Android app. On Windows I have to use 3-4 pieces of software to get goto, platesolving and live stacking. And there is no mobile app solution other than doing a Remote desktop. And the single biggest advantage that Stellarmate has over ASIAir is that it supports so much more equipment.
I would really like Stellarmate to work for users like me. I will return to it once I see that it is stable and has features that are easy to use for people like me. But I'm afraid right now, for EAA users like me, ASIAir Pro/Plus has a clear advantage of usability and ease of use.
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