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kens

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Posts posted by kens

  1. You cannot make is longer as it is a function of the mechanics of the mount. The video you followed gives the right approach to sorting out the gear mesh so you may need to redo the RA axis. Unfortunately you can only try it and star test till you get it right. It may not be fixable by adjustment. A belt mod could help if you wanted to go down that path.

  2. 5 hours ago, StevieDvd said:

    Just added the indi-asi-power to Stellarmate - works OK from a limited test but surprised to see a DSLR tab on it.  This was on a Stellarmate I'd been building the asi-power on manually so I'll reformat and do a clean install again.

    Looking good though.

    The DSLR tab is new and was a request from another forum member. It might need a bit of code tweaking but it completes the functionality of the AAP. 

  3. 11 hours ago, michael8554 said:

    Hi Theo

    Here's what your RA in Guide Assistant looks like:

     

    GA.JPG.b24ce43a97ec4b1b894c39859db27384.JPG  Period.JPG.7319de6ab150464a7dd33b4b34fc605f.JPG

    When GA is selected, RA guiding is paused, and you see the RA performance of the mount.

    RA Error climbs from zero at the left of frame to a peak of 10arcsecs, then starts to fall.

    That's Periodic Error, quite normal.

    What isn't normal is the regular 2.5arcsec oscillation superimposed on the Periodic Error.

    This has a period of 13.6 seconds, see second graph.

    That's too fast for PHD2 to correct, hence it shows in you RA guiding.

    I'm not familiar with the mount, but this is not unusual from what I remember of other posts.

    Someone will chip in with the cause, gearbox maybe ?

    Michael

    13.6 seconds is the gear tooth mesh period on the HEQ5. Every spur gear tooth engages and disengages its counterpart at that period. A spike at this period indicates that the gear mesh should be adjusted at one or more points in the drive train. Often the motor housing positioning is the culprit. A belt mode can help as long as the belt is properly tensioned.

  4. Ok. That means it is nothing to do with having time or location set. When you use the arrows Ekos issues a command through the driver to "Start slewing East" (or West). When you release the button it issues a "Stop slewing" command. If you hit the Stop button it also issues a "Stop slewing" command. Did you try that at the time?

    So it looks like the "Stop slewing" command has gone astray. I'd start by looking at the USB connection. Could be that as the mount slewed the cable came loose? Another possibility is a driver issue. I'm assuming you are using the EQMOD driver and connecting directly to the mount and not via the Synscan. Its a heavily used driver so I would have thought any issue like this would have been picked up by now. A third possibility is that Ekos did not respond to your mouse clicks. Even more people would use that function but it could point to an unresponsive system.

    If you have a Kstars or INDI log that could provide more information. If not, I suggest you enable logging for the Ekos Mount module and the INDI mount driver to capture the details in future.

    To avoid the problem while you sort things out, you could instead use goto instead of a manual slew. That should be safer. 

  5. 2 hours ago, StevieDvd said:

    The panel is appearing and can be set, I think there may be a few issues when turning a power port on/off without the label being chosen first. I'll check those tomorrow but power can be turned on/off on the ports.

    As this is aimed at an Asiair installation of Astroberry would it be better to label the ports 1-4 instead of the coders 0-3?

    I miss the Asiair beep on startup, it seems to quiet at startup now.

    Thanks, that's the kind of feedback I'm looking for. I'll change the port numbers and do a bit of testing on the edge cases e.g. what happens if you change a label. Should the port switch off, stay in its current state or what? I'm inclined to switch off as the safest route but that could be annoying if you make a mistake. I'll also see if I can force the "None" option to be always off. INDI is not so good at disabling controls so it would  be a soft restriction.

    And to keep on topic: With this driver we should have a highly functional power control system for ASIAir users that have outgrown the functionality of the app but do not yet need the power capacity of the Pegasus. From there, adding a Pegasus is easy using the INDI Pegasus driver.

    • Like 1
  6. 6 hours ago, StevieDvd said:

    I got stuck at the first hurdle with - it seems there is no Raspberry/Buster for indinightly

    
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly

    I tried working around that and failed when doing the make command saying that defineProperty was used in wrong scope (line 159 in asipower.cpp) - and suggesting using deleteProperty!

    That's one of the issues I was alluding to with the nightly builds. There is a change in the INDI library which introduces defineProperty for use by all drivers. But the new library is currently only available in the nightly build. So when you try to build it fails unless you install libindi-dev from the nightly. Even then it depends which OS you are running. Last time I looked, it had not yet propogated to Ubuntu 20.10 or 21.04. It should all be sorted with the next INDI release.

  7. Still worth highlighting the risk. 

    58 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

    Ah, ok...as you can see I am not a Linux savy person....👍🏼😂

    I think it's still worth highlighting the risk about the nightly builds. You should remove the nightly PPA as soon as you install the driver if you don't want to be exposed. Or wait till the driver is in the stable build to be completely safe.

    • Like 1
  8. 12 hours ago, StevieDvd said:

    Thanks Ken,

    I have Astroberry & Stellarmate setups to play with as well as an Asiair - my last hurdle is handling the stepper motor focusers (Moonlite & Lakeside) so have a lot of non- ZWO gear and not wanting to buy new ZWO equivalents.  I've added a stepper motor shield to one setup and coding a uno with stepper motor addon - this is so I can circumvent the focus controller boxes. The latter with the Asiair in mind with an alternate OS.

    Will give the beta a looksie.

    Steve

     

    I thought there were already INDI drivers for the Moonlite and Lakeside focusers.

    As a side note, the pigpio library that the driver is based on http://abyz.me.uk/rpi/pigpio/ gives the option to use the GPIO pins on the RPi to drive a stepper motor (via suitable circuitry equivalent to the Arduino shield). 

  9. 8 hours ago, Icesheet said:

    Show me where to sign up 😂

    If you are game to install from the nightly build then:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt install indi-asi-power

    A new release of KStars and INDI is imminent so be careful as the nightly build is on a different version to the stable build and might mess things up for you

    I'm about to push a set of minor fixes to the driver. Hopefully this allows the package to enable the systemd service and also adds some small enhancements. These will take a day or two to make it into the nightly build.

    To remove the nightly ppa

    sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly

     

    • Like 1
  10. 7 minutes ago, StevieDvd said:

    Very interesting, does it have a control panel, have you investigated the control of the wifi & reset options too?

    All INDI drivers have a control panel. This one is very specifically configued to manage the GPIO pins used by the ASIAir Pro but could be easily adapted for other pins and other uses. I don't actually own an ASIAir so initial testing was done on a RPi3 with LEDs connected to the GPIO pins and then by owners of the ASIAir.

    Be aware that when you install another OS that you cannot use the ASIAir app. You need to use Ekos or any other INDI compliant program. So as mentioned above, when you want to use the ASiAir app then boot from the ASI SD card. If you want to control a wider range of equipment with fully functional tools like Ekos and the latest PHD2 then boot from an alternative SD card

    Using an OS like Astroberry or Ubuntu, things like wifi are easily manageable by the usual OS tools. I don't know what the reset options are but assuming they are not GPIO related then I have not investigated that. This driver was solely to ensure that the power ports could still be controlled.

    BTW an alternative is the Astroberry DIY driver. The down side is that its configuration means that the On and Off controls work in reverse. I have a patch to make that configurable, but it also is unable to drive the pins with Pulse Width Modulation e.g. for light panel and dew heater control. So this driver is a completely new one. If you only need On/Off control then the Astroberry DIY driver is a good option and has fewer moving parts.

    • Like 1
  11. 2 hours ago, StevieDvd said:

    Agreed 👍 - I may end up using it with with Astroberry or Stellarmate if I can access the power board fully and the off/on & wifi/reset extras.

    I've just written a new INDI driver that is now in the nightly builds: indi-asi-power lets people who want to convert their ASIAir to a full blown INDI but control the power ports. Still in beta while it is being tested.

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