Remote control AZ-EQ6 with Raspberry Pi

[wimvb]

I've installed indi on several raspberry pi's and two rock64 sbc. The rock64s are controlling an AZ-EQ6, a zwo as120 guide camera, a zwo ASI174MM-cool mono camera, pegasus focuser and zwo filter wheel, and have for the better part of two years. I use Ekos/Kstars on windows.

A while back I had a friend over who has an HEQ5, SW 80ed and a Moravian g2-8300 camera. His pc broke down, so he was dead in the water until I dusted off an old Raspberry Pi. We were in business within 15 minutes, but had problems with platesolving (astromeyry.net). Last time he was over, we downloaded index files and ran his complete setup from the Raspberry pi, including platesolving, connecting with Remote Desktop on his Mac. I would say that this is a working solution.

On a Raspberry pi, once you have Ubuntu installed, it's very straight forward to install the standard indi and ekos software. If you use the stable production version of indi, you shouldn't have any problem. And since the indi team started releasing production versions, there haven't been any problems with updates breaking things, afaIk.

[Gina]

Works fine for me.

[Vox45]

I just re-did my whole setup on an RPI3B+ using Stellarmate (the comercial version of INDI/EKOS) because I was to lazy to redo everyting I had done on a laptop running Linux Mate. So now I run everything from the RPI at the mount plugged into my power distribution box v.2  

I can now connect with VNC over WIFI (the PI act as an access point) and I use a GPS dongle to provide location/time to the Ekos/Kstar and the mount. I would say that from the time I received my RPI, install the Stellarmate image and test my new setup it took around 1 hour  it took some time to watch a couple of videos on the Stellarmate youtube channel  and I was up and running in no time. I even got myself a GPS dongle for 15€ to setup the time and location since the RPI does not have an RTC onboard. 

So, all in all it works great, I only do DSO imaging so RPI3B+ is fine. 

As a precaution, I bought 2 microSD cards and, once the configuration was to my licking, I burned the same image on both cards, so if I am in the field and something goes wrong with my OS or INDI I can just switch cards and reboot to a clean setup...

So now I only have one cable coming from the mount (power cable) ... until someone comes up with a golf ball size nuclear fusion powered power supply  

[stash_old]

1 hour ago, Vox45 said:

As a precaution, I bought 2 microSD cards and, once the configuration was to my licking, I burned the same image on both cards, so if I am in the field and something goes wrong with my OS or INDI I can just switch cards and reboot to a clean setup...

My god someone with common sense - all power to you - wish other people would save themselves problems. Nice one ?

[Osprey]

I'm going to try the above directions on a 5 year old Gateway (Acer) laptop and see if I can get the same or similar results.  I have an Orion 10 inch setup in my observatory and with my Pi 2B currently monitoring conditions and controlling the vitals of the observatory...I think the laptop will be a better fit for me (DS, Planetary, Solar imaging)...fingers crossed