Frederick,

My main usage scenario is mount + scope + rPI outside on my deck, with me inside the house. My area is too cold for me to be outside or to snake a cable through a door somehow. The rpi has direct line of sight to my router, and is no more than 20 feet away. I experimented quite a lot of times with where to sit inside my house to do EAA, and thought I had found some good spots. The behavior is very unpredictable. One day it will work, the next day from the same spot, it will take me 15 minutes just to get a reliable connection.

But I had learned to live with that. Waiting for live stacking to either be more powerful/feature-rich, and struggling through the latest "optical trains" feature and the forced OS update leading to flashing + re-setup is what finally broke my resolve. I teach programming for a living, so I understand the difficulties of maintaining software and debugging. But seeing new features like optical trains (which did not work for me) when so many users had been talking for a long time about existing stability issues and the need to develop live stacking further, just leads me to believe that the Stellarmate developers seem to have a different vision for the product and different priorities than what I had hoped. I have used open-source programs before, and know that they seem less polished than other commercial products. But since Stellarmate OS is a paid product, I expected a smoother experience and a more robust program.

There are a couple of very long threads on Cloudy Nights: one describing an EAA setup by "cuiv the lazy geek" using Stellarmate that got a lot of interest and likely Stellarmate customers (like me), and another equally long thread of users basically struggling and then giving up on trying to get a reliable setup using Stellarmate. "I am moving on to windows/ASIAIR, but I really like the idea of Stellarmate and will watch to see if it becomes stable and usable enough" is a sentiment that is repeatedly echoed on that thread.

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