Help with Astroberry Home & Park please

[Adreneline]

Hi Astroberry users.

I am a new Astroberry user and I am seriously confused by one aspect in particular when using Astroberry, namely Home and Park. I think I understand that Home is what I have hitherto referred to as 'park' when I park the mount at the end of the evening and Park is where one might choose to position the mount (with OTA) so you can close the observatory roof (if you have one - which I don't!). Please correct me if I have that wrong.

I've tried setting the Home position and I've tried setting Park to be the same as Home but no matter what I do when I select Park at the end of a session the mount (iOptron CEM25EC) goes off to some random position; on one occasion I am pretty convinced the OTA would have hit the mount had I not been there to switch if off - pull the plug! I also discovered tonight that Astroberry had somehow redefined the Home position I had set in the mount Hand Set so that when I used it to park the mount in my home position it once again went off to some random location.

Can someone give me some clues as to what I am doing wrong. As things stand I dare not use the option to Park the mount at the end of an imaging session - so I will be getting up at 03.30 to park it manually.

Most other aspects of Astroberry I am starting to get to grips with it's just this aspect that is giving me some grief.

Thanks in advance.

Adrian

[RadekK]

PARK is mount's "position at rest", which by default is scope looking to north pole, counter-weight down. A system must know that your scope/mount is in this position to park back to this position. How it can be achieved depends mainly on a mount because not all of them support HOME... I would suggest the following steps to set things up:

1. Make your mount find HOME with a hand controller and shut things down. The scope should be pointing to north pole, counter-weight down. If it is not, release clutches and set it to this physical position. If your mount has encoders and it's not pointing right, there is some other problem and you should stop here, read and play until mount is pointing as described, before moving to step 2.

1. Connect everything (INDI with drivers, Ekos started)

2. UnPARK your mount

3. Go to INDI control panel / Site Management tab and click Current, then Write Data - this will set your current position as PARK position and save it to a file

4. Click PARK - at this point only mount status should change to PARKed, but your mount should not move at all (see point 3).

5. Click unPARK - no move expected, mount ready to slew

6. Slew your mount to any direction

7. PARK - your mount should come back to position set in point 3

8. From now on use PARK/UNPARK only.

In case there is some major failure e.g. you loose power the middle of a session, you would have to find HOME again. YOur PARK position should not change though. If it does you need to recalibrate PARK position again.

 

[stash_old]

13 hours ago, RadekK said:

PARK is mount's "position at rest", which by default is scope looking to north pole, counter-weight down. A system must know that your scope/mount is in this position to park back to this position. How it can be achieved depends mainly on a mount because not all of them support HOME... I would suggest the following steps to set things up:

1. Make your mount find HOME with a hand controller and shut things down. The scope should be pointing to north pole, counter-weight down. If it is not, release clutches and set it to this physical position. If your mount has encoders and it's not pointing right, there is some other problem and you should stop here, read and play until mount is pointing as described, before moving to step 2.

1. Connect everything (INDI with drivers, Ekos started)

2. UnPARK your mount

3. Go to INDI control panel / Site Management tab and click Current, then Write Data - this will set your current position as PARK position and save it to a file

4. Click PARK - at this point only mount status should change to PARKed, but your mount should not move at all (see point 3).

5. Click unPARK - no move expected, mount ready to slew

6. Slew your mount to any direction

7. PARK - your mount should come back to position set in point 3

8. From now on use PARK/UNPARK only.

In case there is some major failure e.g. you loose power the middle of a session, you would have to find HOME again. YOur PARK position should not change though. If it does you need to recalibrate PARK position again.

 

Unfortunately thats doesn't work with SW AZ GoTo - there is no "Write Data" in Ekos or Indi Settings that I could see under any tabs 🙂- Clear yes,Park -yes,Unpark Yes, Park North (never works) Unpark Northe,east,west etc - never works.

Also on a SWAZ Goto if you try anything like the above YOU WILL CRASH INTO LEGS as it just goes around and around and around like a merry go round - So I suggest do it as a test with your kit BUT be close at hand .

[festoon]

I found the same issue as @stash_old...with the sw az indi there was no way to park the scope at north and level. When I tried park north it sent the Ota on a merry go round and I had to pull the plug to stop it hitting the mount legs.

and if I use the sw gti driver with indi it only parks at the north celestrial pole

Edited May 16, 2020 by festoon

[RadekK]

😞

[stash_old]

1 hour ago, festoon said:

I found the same issue as @stash_old...with the sw az indi there was no way to park the scope at north and level. When I tried park north it sent the Ota on a merry go round and I had to pull the plug to stop it hitting the mount legs.

and if I use the sw gti driver with indi it only parks at the north celestrial pole

minr always starts from the south. You cannot change anything like starts from North etc as Indi or Ekos ignores.

So I just got used to starting south at the horizon - no big deal on the SWAZ goto 🙂

[stash_old]

1 hour ago, RadekK said:

😞

Just how it is Radek 🙂  As the saying goes in UK "Rome wasn't built in a day" 🙂

[Stu Todd]

You're doing Gods work @RadekK, you have made so many astronomers pleased, but there must be those who can't think for themselves also

[festoon]

hi @RadekK and @Stu Todd sorry if you thought I was complaining - far from it. Just trying to get my sw mount and indi to work well together

[Adreneline]

20 hours ago, RadekK said:

PARK is mount's "position at rest", which by default is scope looking to north pole, counter-weight down. A system must know that your scope/mount is in this position to park back to this position. How it can be achieved depends mainly on a mount because not all of them support HOME.

Thank you for the clarification and the advice. I'll go through the steps you detail and feed back.

Thanks again.

Adrian

[RadekK]

This is fine, no bad feelings whatsoever 🙂

 

[Adreneline]

On 15/05/2020 at 23:43, RadekK said:

3. Go to INDI control panel / Site Management tab and click Current, then Write Data - this will set your current position as PARK position and save it to a file

Hi Radek.

Can I just clarify this point - do I need to / should I have to do this at the start of every imaging session, i.e. as soon as I power up the system and connect all devices. If I don't then I am finding that when I Park the mount it consistently parks with the DEC axis correctly positioned but the RA axis is always 90 degress out, i.e. the counterweight bar is horizontal. It's almost like the above step does not save the data to a file, or if it does I lose it each time I shut down.

I am also finding that when I Park with Kstars/Ekos and then check with the hand controller on the mount there is more often than not a slight movement of the mount when I ask it to go to the Park position whereas I would expect no movement at all.

Sorry if I am missing something obvious.

On the plus side everything else I've tried (GoTo, plate solving, image collection/sequencing) is now working perfectly, (I do manual focusing and filter changing) it's just this slight problem with Parking I've not been able to sort. 

Thanks for your help and a great piece of software.

Adrian

[Stuart1971]

When you use the park command, and the scope parks with CW bar horizontal, switch off and move the mount with RA clutch released to correct position, then start up again and try it all again, and should then be good every time, for some reason park data has got skewed, also purge the “write data” before you save it...

This only needs to be done once, not every session HTH 👍

[Adreneline]

6 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

When you use the park command, and the scope parks with CW bar horizontal, switch off and move the mount with RA clutch released to correct position, then start up again and try it all again, and should then be good every time, for some reason park data has got skewed, also purge the “write data” before you save it...

This only needs to be done once, not every session HTH 👍

Thanks for this advice.

Just one thing I'd like to check before taking this step. The mount all works fine when I use it with my 135mm/ZWO-ASI1600 combination driven by the ASIair. What I am aiming to do with Astroberry is to have a similar setup in terms of working processes but using my 85mm/Atik414ex-osc combination on the CEM25-EC. If I follow your advice will it still be ok with the ASIair or might that now be 90 degrees out?

Thanks again.

Adrian

[Stuart1971]

19 minutes ago, Adreneline said:

Thanks for this advice.

Just one thing I'd like to check before taking this step. The mount all works fine when I use it with my 135mm/ZWO-ASI1600 combination driven by the ASIair. What I am aiming to do with Astroberry is to have a similar setup in terms of working processes but using my 85mm/Atik414ex-osc combination on the CEM25-EC. If I follow your advice will it still be ok with the ASIair or might that now be 90 degrees out?

Thanks again.

Adrian

The thing is with any software, it will assume that when you first power up the scope is in the home position, weights down scope pointing at NCP, unless you have predefined a different position in the software...

So your mount is an EC version, so it has encoders, this may well be the issue, I have them on my EQ8 but have them turned off all the time...

So when you start Kstars and power on the mount, where is the red mount crosshair on the skymap, it should start on the NCP...? And how have yo got the mount set up at this point, with weights down and pointing at the NCP...?

[Adreneline]

3 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

So when you start Kstars and power on the mount, where is the red mount crosshair on the skymap, it should start on the NCP...? And how have yo got the mount set up at this point, with weights down and pointing at the NCP...?

Yes, the crosshairs are on the NCP with weights down - just like it is when I use the mount with Sky Safari and the ASIair; polar aligned with a PoleMaster.

There is a lot of similarity between the two systems and they are both INDI based which is why I can't get my head around what is happening. Everything works just fine until I come to Park. I was wondering if it was an encoder related issue which the ASIair is handling correctly and the Astroberry is getting confused over.

I should also add that if I use the mount with iOptron Commander and my PC/SGPro/CdC setup it all works fine; sending it to Park in CdC works every time.

Thanks again for your help.

Adrian

[Adreneline]

22 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

The thing is with any software, it will assume that when you first power up the scope is in the home position, weights down scope pointing at NCP

Hi Stuart,

Just another thing to throw into the mix. I tried using CCDCeil and CdC running on my PC and communicating with the mount using the Pi as an INDI server. That resulted in the mount parking with the DEC axis aligned as expected and the RA axis at 45 degrees! Ummm????

Adrian

[stash_old]

1 hour ago, Adreneline said:

Hi Stuart,

Just another thing to throw into the mix. I tried using CCDCeil and CdC running on my PC and communicating with the mount using the Pi as an INDI server. That resulted in the mount parking with the DEC axis aligned as expected and the RA axis at 45 degrees! Ummm????

Adrian

Still suspect your Indi settings but if you are using CDC/CCDCIEL and think there is a problem (I assume you are using the Park Script in CCDCIEL) please contact Patrick Chevalley (or maybe he will answer on SGL) on the CCDCIEL forum he is always happy to help - https://groups.io/g/ccdciel/topics. - 🙂

Plus note what to do if the settings are corrupt (taken from Indi's EQMOD driver) - basically the same as Radek said.

• UTC: UTC time and offsets must be set for proper operation of the driver upon connection. The UTC offset is in hours. East is positive and west is negative.
• Location: Latitude and Longitude must be set for proper operation of the driver upon connection. The longitude range is 0 to 360 degrees increasing eastward from Greenwich.
• Parking Position: Upon connection to the mount, Ekos loads these values into the mount's motor controller to initialize the (stepper) motor step values. The default values represent the home position where the mount points to the celestial pole - i.e. 0 deg RA, 90 deg DEC.
• Parking: To set the parking position of the mount to the home position, click “Default”, then "Write Data " - this saves the home values as the parking values. To set the parking position of the mount to a custom position, slew the mount to the desired position and click “Current”, then "Write Data " - this saves the current motor step values as the parking values.
  • IMPORTANT: For the first time Ekos connects to the mount, or if for any reason the parking position has become incorrect. Make sure the mount is in the home position, power up the mount, connect Ekos and set the parking position to home by clicking “Default”, then "Write Data ".

Edited May 24, 2020 by stash_old

[Adreneline]

18 minutes ago, stash_old said:

Parking: To set the parking position of the mount to the home position, click “Default”, then "Write Data " - this saves the home values as the parking values.

Thanks for all the advice and help. Maybe this is where I am going wrong - I've been using Current and not Default. I shall give that a go!

I was only using CdC/CCDCeil to see if I had the same problems with INDI - as it turned out I had a slightly different problem. My goal is to get Astroberry working. I'm nearly there thanks to the help from everyone whose contributed on this forum.

Thanks again.

Adrian

[Adreneline]

35 minutes ago, stash_old said:

click “Default”, then "Write Data "

A quick update - sadly that didn't work either. It would seem that in order to guarantee the mount returns to the Park position I have to go into Site Management and click Current and then Write Data at the beginning of each session, i.e. after shutdown and power down. As long as I know I have to do that each time it's no big problem - I'll just add it to my written Check/Prompt List of things to do - like remembering to switch on the camera cooler!

Thanks again for taking the time to help.

Adrian

[RadekK]

One more thing. Have you saved your configuration (Options / Save)? If not, try doing this after setting park position. I'm not sure, but it might help.

BTW. if encoders are in use you need to set proper home (=park?) position with your hand controller. Otherwise, whatever you do mount will identify it's physical position based on encoders, ignoring any position saved by software/drivers.