Ekos/INDI and clashing serial port paths

[JamesF]

It appears that my EQMOD device and filter wheel are fighting over serial port names in Ekos.  One uses a Prolific chipset and the other an FTDI chipset, so I can probably play with the udev rules to force a fixed device name or something like that, but before I get into that, I know Stellar Mate has some sort of helper application for sorting this out.  Is there anything similar for Ekos/INDI that might save me some work?

James

[StarDodger]

1 minute ago, JamesF said:

It appears that my EQMOD device and filter wheel are fighting over serial port names in Ekos.  One uses a Prolific chipset and the other an FTDI chipset, so I can probably play with the udev rules to force a fixed device name or something like that, but before I get into that, I know Stellar Mate has some sort of helper application for sorting this out.  Is there anything similar for Ekos/INDI that might save me some work?

James

You mean the serial port manager in Stellarmate, I don’t think that there is anything actually in Kstars / ekos, but there is a button in ekos that is for the serial port manager, but it does not do anything yet, but maybe it’s going to be added as part of ekos in the near future..

But take a look here, it may help, I used his other AstroPI3 script to install all the software onto my raspbian based rpi4 it is superb and makes it very easy, so this may be good too...

https://github.com/rlancaste/AstroPi3/blob/master/udevRuleScript.sh

[JamesF]

That looks like it might be a good place to start.  Thank you.

James

[JamesF]

Shame I didn't find this problem earlier, actually.  I only put the filter wheel in the imaging train at about 7pm this evening though.

James

[don4l]

I've started to have some problems in the last week.  As far as I can tell, the only change in my system is that I upgraded to the latest version of Indi.

The problem that I am seeing is that the Eqmod driver seems to die after my Robofocus driver starts.  Shutting the Indi server down and restarting each driver "manually" from IndiGui seems to sort things out.  I can then get CCDCiel to connect to everything.

I tried out Ekos some months ago, and I don't think my solution would work with that version of Ekos.  The problem is that Ekos insisted on starting the Indi server and all the drivers. 

It might be that a short time gap between connecting each of the USB devices is fixing the problem.

If Ekos is now allowing you to connect to a running Indi server, then you can test my theory.  Use IndyStarter to start the server, then use IndiGui to connect to each device.  Then start Ekos and see if everything works.

I can test this next time I have  a clear night.

I gave up on Ekos because it didn't allow Indi to run "stand alone".  I think that I have recently read that in fact there was a bug in one of the Ekos releases.  I must have had that release.

 

[JamesF]

I discovered only the other night that it's possible to enable a large amount of logging for Ekos/INDI when there are problems.  That's turned out to be quite helpful already for identifying some problems.

I think there's another way to do what you need, which is to disable "auto connect" in the Ekos config.  Then when the INDI config window pops up you can start connections individually.

James

[StarDodger]

9 hours ago, JamesF said:

That looks like it might be a good place to start.  Thank you.

James

No problem, hope you get it sorted...

The main script is excellent, especially for the Linux noob....which I realise you are not, but it helped me loads

https://github.com/rlancaste/AstroPi3

[don4l]

56 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I discovered only the other night that it's possible to enable a large amount of logging for Ekos/INDI when there are problems.  That's turned out to be quite helpful already for identifying some problems.

I think there's another way to do what you need, which is to disable "auto connect" in the Ekos config.  Then when the INDI config window pops up you can start connections individually.

James

I'll have a look into the logging options next time that I am out.  I am getting a message along the lines of" EQMOD - failed to connect on /dev/usb1".  This appears at the bottom of the IndiGui window.

I'm fairly sure that I had the "auto connect" switched off when I tried Ekos.  It doesn't really matter now because I am getting on very well with CCDCiel.

[StarDodger]

27 minutes ago, don4l said:

I'll have a look into the logging options next time that I am out.  I am getting a message along the lines of" EQMOD - failed to connect on /dev/usb1".  This appears at the bottom of the IndiGui window.

I'm fairly sure that I had the "auto connect" switched off when I tried Ekos.  It doesn't really matter now because I am getting on very well with CCDCiel.

Does that work with the raspberry PI too, or just windows and Linux..??

[david_taurus83]

If one device connects and the other doesn't, you can select the free port and connect to that instead.

[don4l]

1 hour ago, StarDodger said:

Does that work with the raspberry PI too, or just windows and Linux..??

The PI is Linux.  Raspbian is just a flavour of Ubuntu Linux.

 

I used a PI3+ as a testbed before setting up my current system.  The differences between the PI and my current Ubuntu 16.04 system are mainly cosmetic from a software point of view.  There are two reasons that I now use a Linux laptop.  The main one is that the PI couldn't transfer the image data quickly enough. (I believe PI4 is much improved).  The other reason is that I find it useful to have a screen beside the mount.  Especially when I am manually focusing a helical focuser.

 

 

[JamesF]

Hmmm, well, that script sadly isn't doing well on Mint19.  Not sure what the problem is, but for the time being I've swapped to the filter wheel I had on the back of my C9.25, which doesn't have the serial device clash problem.

James

[JamesF]

Gah!  The INDI driver looks like it only works with a 7-position filter wheel and I have the ZWO 5-position one.  It's even telling me it has found a five-position filter wheel.  So what's the problem?  Just get on with it then!  All you have to do is count to five.  It's not even as hard as counting to seven.

James

[david_taurus83]

Have you tried to hardware map your devices? Also, I seem to get less issues if I use the web manager to setup a profile and map the serial ports in there as well.

[JamesF]

I ended up configuring udev to create a symbolic link in /dev to each device based on the USB VID and PID, much as the above script does on Raspbian.  For reasons I couldn't work out however, INDI couldn't open the linked device.

However, as the filter wheel in question looks as though it has just died the entire issue may end up somewhat moot.

Now I have a different problem to solve.  Namely why INDI complains that an alternative (ZWO mini) filter wheel that I robbed off the back of my C9.25 doesn't have enough slots.

James