Astroberry / KStars on Rpi - advice needed

[teoria_del_big_bang]

1 hour ago, TerryMcK said:

Another thing that you may also find is that sometimes the ZWO cameras seems to default to taking 8 bit images - annoying after a clear night as you can't process them.

Thanks for the tip, I hope that only happened the one time, a clear night up North is precious.

Steve

Edited May 22, 2020 by teoria_del_big_bang

[TerryMcK]

I noticed it when doing Darks as instead of large files it was creating them at 2MB in size and DSS complained when I tried to stack  

But I'd already taken 16bit lights so all was ok - phew.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I am slowly getting to grips with this but still cannot get the guide camera to work.

Well I say I cannot get it to work it is even odder. If I select the camera in the INDI control panel I can take images by pressing "Set" with no issues.

Also I can select the guide camera in Ekos and take an image again with no problems (ignore the fact that the capture is just noise the rig is in a dark garage while I test it)

But if I try a capture or click on loop with the Guide tab in Ekos selected then very occasionally it will capture an image but more often than not it times  out and displays an error "Exposure timeout".  And this is the exact same if I try it in PHD as well. Can't seem to make sense of it. The camera is obviously working so I guess I have some setting or parameter wrong somewhere.

If I try PHD2 then I get this fault everytime:

Or sometimes this fault in PHD2.

Steve

Edited May 22, 2020 by teoria_del_big_bang

[CedricTheBrave]

i dont have mine set like that, I dont select a guide cam in the ekos settings just choose phd guiding.

i then use phd to connect to the camera and and the indi server for the mount

then select guide in ekos and it connects to phd and if needed does a calibration then starts guiding

does that make sense?

[wornish]

Here is a useful tutorial that shows you how to use PHD2 with EKOS.

 

 

[teoria_del_big_bang]

10 hours ago, CedricTheBrave said:

i dont have mine set like that, I dont select a guide cam in the ekos settings just choose phd guiding.

i then use phd to connect to the camera and and the indi server for the mount

then select guide in ekos and it connects to phd and if needed does a calibration then starts guiding

does that make sense?

Cheers, maybe that is where I am going wrong using the guide camera directly to PHD may work as that is more like what it was before and never had issue then. Thanks for that I will give it a try.

Steve

[teoria_del_big_bang]

2 hours ago, wornish said:

Here is a useful tutorial that shows you how to use PHD2 with EKOS.

Thanks, not had chance to look at it yet but will when I have time. 

Steve

[CedricTheBrave]

2 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Cheers, maybe that is where I am going wrong using the guide camera directly to PHD may work as that is more like what it was before and never had issue then. Thanks for that I will give it a try.

Steve

That video above is exactly how I use it

 

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I think if I get this guiding sorted, which I may well do with the above help (many thanks).

One thing I noticed last night is I may have a bit of an issue with my network. I have auto reconnect enabled in astroberry and whilst searching online for things I noticed that astroberry kept dropping the connection and reconnecting every so often. It reconnected fine and may always have done this wit my old setup. But with the old setup that would not be an issue because everything ran off the computer at the mount, it would just be the remote desktop that stopped working for a while, but sequencing would continues fine and nothing lost, even if the connection dropped altogether.

And as I have it now with everything running on the RPi I guess the same would go for that.

But, if I only run the INDI server on the mount and then run astroberry / EKOS on the main computer would that not then run the possibility of loosing some images if the connection drops momentarily ?

Forgive my ignorance about how astroberry / INDI / and Ekos work together I still have not fully worked that one out 🙂 

Steve

[CedricTheBrave]

I run it all on the rpi4

i cannot see how it would work if it did lose connection as the session would be interrupted so an abort would happen.

I cannot see any benefit of running them separately 

@RadekK may be able to confirm

[RadekK]

Running KStars/Ekos on PC and connecting via network to INDI server with drivers and devices on Raspberry Pi is not safe in terms of network connection errors. If you lose connection during a session it will be aborted and there is not resume option available. You would have to restart everything from scratch. Likewise everything running on Raspberry Pi is totally network errors proof i.e. losing connection just disconnects you from viewing remote desktop, but everything continues to work on Raspberry Pi. You can safely disconnect and shutdown your PC and reconnect when needed. Including reconnecting from other device to see what's going on with your system running at a scope.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

With a relatively clear and almost moonless night I gave it a try out last night.

My early elation was short lived. The guiding was just not working aging either with HD2 or the internal guider.

Unfortunately I did  not want to stop up all night so played about bit didn't really take all the screen shots of things I should have so I can get the help I needed.

I seemed to do a lot of things right and to be honest there is an awful lot about KStars i really like and would like to still pursue this before giving up and going back to a Windows based system.

I do like the way you just click once and it platesolves and re-syncs the scope then platesolces again and would move again if needed but it was bang on after that everytime.

I am not too keen on having all these seperate screens open just on one monitor when I have two. Is this just me - is there a way to use two monitors on a remote computer ? This really is a downside if I cannot.

Also three times KStars crashed and I had to re-open. Again I did not like this. If this happens during a sequence and I was not monitoring it then the night could be lost.  It did happen when I clicked on something so whether it is more robust when just running the sequences without any user input I am not sure but it does not seem as stable as I would expect software to be in this day and age.

Regarding guiding this just did not work whatsoever. Same sort of issue as I have had from the start. If I select the guide camera inhe camera tab instead of the main camera then it works a treat and it works flawlessly every time. 

In PHD or in the guiding tab the camera and mount connect fine but just times out when taking any image of a few seconds. 

Quite a few times I have managed to take a set of darks so long as I bin it at at least 2x2. But I keep taking a set of darks and it is happy for a while but more often than not when I shut the RPi down and back up again it says the darks library is for a different camera and I have to do it again, if it lets me. Also I seem to have to set camera to 8 bit and 640 x 380 pixels to have any chance of taking images, it will not take a single frame at 1240 x 760 or at 16 bit. There are a few other parameters I have to tweak as well. But every time I shut the RPI down, or maybe just when I shut INDI down they all seem to revert back to what they were and I have to set them all over again.

Also PHD 2 keeps crashing and I have to restart, all in all a bit of a pain.

Tried a few unguided images wit main camera and all that side seems fine.

I may try  different guide camera.

Steve

 

Steve

[wornish]

Have you looked at the PHD2 Guiding YouTube video?  I posted the link in my earlier post on this thread.

Sounds like your settings are not quite right.

Linux is just different to Windows I agree.  It takes a while to re-teach your muscle memory:}  but perseverance pays off.

You can open multiple VNC sessions to see your RPI from separate screens but it does put a significant load on the WiFi connection so be careful.

 

[endless-sky]

Hi Steve,

as you know, I have a setup running Raspberry Pi 4 and I use the Kstars/EKOS suite to run my equipment. I will try to help you on some of the issues you encountered, as I have encountered them myself!

As far as GPS is concerned, I do not have a physical GPS device to attach to the Pi. The way I used to do it was to set up a home location on KStars and have KStars configured to update all devices. This would correctly pass the location information to the mount, but I could not change the system clock. Therefore the pointing accuracy of the mount was completely off. So I tried a different approach: I give priority to the network connection on my home WI-FI 100, to the Astroberry hotspot -100, reboot the Pi. The Pi now syncs the system clock correctly, while KStars takes care of the geo coordinates. Since the WI-FI connection is not superstable, I re-edit the connection options to give 100 to the hotspot and -100 to the WI-FI and reboot again. The clock is still correct, but now I VNC to the Pi through the hotspot, which is very stable (never dropped on me once since I started imaging with this setup). All this gets very tiring and time consuming, though. Fortunately some time ago I found this thread on the INDI Forum:

https://indilib.org/forum/astroberry/6389-write-a-guide-astroberry-and-gps-rtc.html

This was a life saver. I can use NetGPS on my Android phone, connect it to the Astroberry hotspot, set up a GPS NMEA as an auxiliary tab on EKOS, connect it to the IP address and port of the NetGPS on the phone and GPS NMEA feeds the geo and clock info to KStars, which in turn feeds them to the mount. Everything is synced perfectly and I do not need to start the Pi connected to the WI-FI anymore and then change back to hotspot, only to sync the system clock. I only connect it to the WI-FI when I need to update the system, but I do not have to do that during an imaging session, wasting precious time, anymore. The system clock still does not get updated, with this method, but the important thing is that KStars knows exactly what time it is and has the correct geo coordinate to handle the mount slewing without any problem. Using the phone as the added advantage that if there are not WI-FI connections available, you can do everything with your phone.

For copying and pasting, I noticed that with the terminal I have to right click and then click on Paste on the drop down menu. I never managed to copy and paste from the laptop to the terminal in Pi, but I am sure the suggestions given by Radek work (I have not tried, yet, though).

As far as setting up guiding, I do not know much, yet, as I have not purchased my guiding setup yet. All I can tell you is what I know from reading in the INDI Forum: the ASI 120MM has problems with EKOS/Raspberry (some people have problem with the Mini, other people with the -S, some people do not have problems with neither. Nothing definitive about this subject and too risky to consider buying those camera models. As I anticipated you with the private messages, I will most likely go with the ASI 224MC. More sensitive, less noisy, USB 3, less issues, better all around. Plus can be used also for planetary/lunar work). Another thing I can tell you about guide cameras is that sometimes they do not work because the Pi is giving power to too many things: buying a powered USB hub seems to solve many issues people having with their cameras.

Another issue you pointed out was concerning the differences between running everything on the Pi and accessing it with a remote desktop or using the Pi as a server and running all the applications on a remote computer. I use the first approach: everything is connected to the Pi, I run KStars and EKOS on the Pi, and I remote desktop on the Pi from the laptop using VNC Viewer. VNC Server is already installed on Astroberry, so setting this up on the laptop is super easy (all you need to do is use the IP address of the hotspot for the VNC connection and connect the laptop to the hotspot of Astroberry). The pros of this approach have already been mentioned: even if the connection between the remote computer and the Pi is lost, the Pi keeps doing its things and nothing is lost. All you have to do is connect again and VNC again and you will see the Pi still running (sequence, guiding, everything you programmed it to do before starting the session). The cons are that all the applications are running on the Pi, which might be a little slower approach. I have the Pi 4 with 4GB and I have not run in any issues, yet. The applications run smoothly, I can even use DSS colored sky overlay on KStars to touch up my framing and it handles it very well. Sure, platesolving is a little bit slower than if you used a pretty recent home computer and also downloading the images from the camera to the Pi slows down things a bit (I use a USB 3 stick for the images, so I do not shorten the life of the SD card, but I am sure that if I used an SSD hard drive things would improve). But I would not risk losing an imaging session because of a lost connection just to improve a couple of seconds on platesolving and image downloading time. My laptop is barely good enough to run Lubuntu and VNC Viewer, anyway (which is the main reason I abandoned Windows and bought a Pi to begin with... much cheaper than buying a new laptop = more money to dedicate to astrophotography) so I would actually lose more time trying to run all the applications on the laptop and just use the Pi as a server...

For the dual monitor I cannot help you, but I can give you a pointer: under the EKOS part of KStars configuration check the Independent Window checkbox. This way you can go from KStars to EKOS to FIT Viewer without having to minimize one or the other or move them out of the way. Saved me from many issues with windows overlapping whenever I wanted to go from one application to the other.

As already mentioned, always check that your cameras are configured with the correct number of bits. Seems like a recurring issue in the INDI Forums...

For the meridian flip I cannot help you, but I am sure what was already suggested is the way to go. I have not had to do a meridian flip, yet, as I do attended astrophotography sessions and I have never stayed up long enough to have the need for a meridian flip (since I bought the Pi, I have been imaging in the North-East part of the sky anyway...).

I had KStars crashing on me, too, on some occasions, but the crashes were always triggered by me doing something wrong (expecially in the autofocus module, which I use as a manual assisted focuser to calculate FWHD values, as I do not have a real autofocuser, yet). Once I figured out clicking what would cause the applications to crash, I have not had any issues since.

One last suggestion I can make is this: in order to rule out if the guiding does not work because of the guide camera model, I would try using the 1600 as a guider. Of course you would not be able to take any pictures with it while you test it, but at least you would see if you can get the EKOS guiding module to work.

I think that is it for now, sorry for the lengthy post, but I hope I was able to help you getting your setup to work. I agree, it is a steep learning curve. I had to go all at once from Windows to Linux and from APT to KStars/EKOS, so I had to figure out a lot of things at once. The quarantine time surely helped: if I had been working during these past couple of months, I would not have been able to dedicate all this time to troubleshooting and I would still probably have a lot of problems, so the home time helped, in a way. Once I figured everything out, though, the combo Raspberry/Astroberry/KStars/EKOS is really a fantastic suite and I could not thank the developers of this system enough. I even managed to setup unguided dithering, which is an awesome feature. I know soon I will have to face new problems, too, as I will be adding a guide camera to the mix as well. But I have faith that at the end everything will run flawlessly.

The only thing I miss from my old Windows setup is the EQMOD ability to run PEC even on non permanent PEC mounts like mine (NEQ6 Pro): it would sync the motor positions to the PE curve, provided that I always switched off the mount in the Park position. It was really nice being able to take almost twice as long exposures without trailing. With EKOS I cannot do this as this type of synced PEC is not supported. But this will be solved soon with the guiding setup, so I am sure I will not be missing this feature in the future.

Hope this helped.

Clear skies,

Matteo

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Many thanks Dave and Matteo for the advive.

I did read all the previous posts and any links included but just could not work out what was going on.

In desperation, and because I had read another thread with somebody have issues with the Altair guide camera I had, but I think they got it working (somehow - eludes me though) , I retrieved the ASI224MC camera out of my allsky camera to tey as a guide camera just to see if this was any better.

I don't want to jinx anything so I will say this very quietly - it just seems to work with this camera.

I say seems to work this is just with the rig in the garage in relative daylight so no guiding as such. BUT, I am a bit more hopeful. To get the Altair camera to do anything I had to really mess about, set binning to at least 2x2 and change all sorts of gains etc. Also the INDI setup just seemed to revert back to default every time I powered off and so had to do this every time.  This ZWO camera seems to keep the settings and just loops in PHD2 (although no stars yet obviously to setup the guiding).

Also with the Altair PHD was always complaining about no darks library even though I had done it a dozen times. I will now take a new set of darks and see if that fault is cured. 

Anyway Shh, I won't say anything out loud just yet a few more tests and try it out under a clear sky with any luck.

 

Also Matteo I know this is not the guide camera you talked about but I do have 2 ZWO cameras attached and so far seen no issues so if all goes well tonight I will go ahead and order the ZWO mini guide camera and give it a go.

Steve

[MarkAR]

27 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

somebody have issues with the Altair guide camera

I had similar issues with my Altair GPCAM3 224C (USB3), it did not like being plugged into the same powered USB2 hub as the main camera. I had to plug it directly to my MacAir to get both to work at the same time. It was still glitchy and I had a few EKOS crashes. I figured that my 12 YO MacAir didn't have the processing power so got a MacBookPro and to tidy it all up a Pegasus UPB V2, all works fine now. Didn't go down the RPi route, just direct to laptop.

[endless-sky]

Hi Steve,

nice, I didn't know you had an ASI 224MC! Let me know if you manage to make it work ok for guiding, because that's exactly the camera I am thinking of buying for my guide setup. If it works with your Astroberry - fingers crossed - it should also work with mine. As I told you in the messages, I want to abandon the 120MM (Mini or -S), as too many people are having problems making it run with Pi/KStars/EKOS. The 224MC seems a better choice in all respects and it will also double as a planetary camera.

Let me know!

Clear skies,

Matteo

[teoria_del_big_bang]

1 minute ago, endlessky said:

Hi Steve,

nice, I didn't know you had an ASI 224MC! Let me know if you manage to make it work ok for guiding, because that's exactly the camera I am thinking of buying for my guide setup. If it works with your Astroberry - fingers crossed - it should also work with mine. As I told you in the messages, I want to abandon the 120MM (Mini or -S), as too many people are having problems making it run with Pi/KStars/EKOS. The 224MC seems a better choice in all respects and it will also double as a planetary camera.

Let me know!

Clear skies,

Matteo

To be honest I forgot for a while as it is in a box of bits for an allsky camera I am building so thought I would give it a go. If it works I either get another or abandon the allskycamera.

Steve

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Well some progress made last night.

Took ages to get the ASI224 colour camera working in being able to see any stars at all. Turned out to be so far out of focus. When I was using the Altair camera the focusser would not extend out far enough and had to pull the camera out of the clamp by about 8 mm to get focus. With this ASI224 it was coming into focus when when wound fully in but still out of focus. Luckily there was a section of the guidescope about 20 mm long I could remove and finally achieved focus.

So to cut to the chase so to speak eventually at 3:00 am I did get it guiding, and it must have been reasonably well as I could take 900 sec images that looked reasonable.

 

 

But I am still not sure it works flawlessly. There is some bug, maybe it is to do with using two ZWO cameras with same drivers. But sometimes the main 1600 camera does not finish its exposure. Say I take a 30 sec sub, the timer loads 30 seconds and it starts the exposure and the counter counts down in seconds, then for last second in tenths but it stays at 0.1 second and just never seems to finish. So maybe just doesn't download the image but it just gets stuck there unless I press stop and then there is no image. Only way round it is to shut EKOS down and re-open everything.  I tend to think if I take an image unguided with the 1600 camera then it works and then start guiding everything works, but if I start guiding first then try to take an image with main camera it doesn't. Also even if this is the case an all going well then if I were to go into the camera tab and select the guide camera in the drop down list and take an image then when I go back to the maincamera it faults again in the same manner.

Anyway at 3:00 am and what darkness there actually is at this time of year fading fast I left it doing a simple sequence of about 6 exposures just to test it all. It seemed to work fine until the flip. It took 3 identical 900 sec exposures and then flipped but then never got going again. As yet I have not looked into why . The last sub before the flip still looked fairly dark so I do not thing it had got too light for the guider to not pick a star out but as I was fast asleep I cannot say for sure.

Steve

 

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I can now use my two monitors on my remote computer to view my Rpi by using Windows remote desktop rather than VNC, so things looking up.

I do have a question about KStars and framing DSOs. Is there some option for it that I have not downloaded because I seem to get very little information about DSOs on the screen compared to Stellarium.  There just seems to be the odd triangle, square  shape here and there no actual images of the DSOs which is quite difficult to use and get the framing correct.

Steve

Edited May 29, 2020 by teoria_del_big_bang

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I know it is a very big ask, but I have documented all my settings in INDI panel just so I know what changes by virtue of running sequences and which is supposed to be set by myself. Also to see if anything changes it shouldn't on power down and power up. If anybody is really bored in lock-down can you have a quick once over and see if there is anything stupid I am doing.

I probably will do same with Ekos. 

Steve

 

2020-05-29.pdf

[Adreneline]

2 hours ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

I have documented all my settings in INDI panel

Thanks for this Steve. I have been following this thread with interest and you are now way ahead of me in the Astroberry stakes.

• My CEM25-EC refuses to remember where Home is between sessions so I have to remember to set it in the Home Management tab at the beginning of each session.
• My Atik osc camera works as expected except that the fits header doesn't seem to convey the fact that the files are RGGB; I have to force CFA in APP before pre-processing.
• Plate solving works a treat albeit quite slowly - that's probably my fault but it would be nice if it was comparable to the ASIair where plate solving typically takes less than 5 seconds.
• Only used a manual focus systems so far and haven't tried guiding yet because the CEM25-EC is so good, all the more so now I use a PoleMaster to PA.

And therein lies my hope - that Astroberry on a Pi4B+ will be every bit as good as ASIair on a Pi3B+ with the bonus that I can use my Atik and/or ZWO imaging camera.

Thanks again for promoting a very illuminating thread.

Adrian

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Adrian,

Still messing with it now to try another test session tonight.

In some respects I would have given up ages ago and gone back to what I have used before as it never went wrong. However, every time i use Ekos I find another really useful thing in there that now I don't want to be without. And yes I really like the platesolving it will do it 2 or 3 times to get you bang on all automatically (APT I had to platesolve then do it again myself if after taking an image I still thought it was a bit out. But APT was lightning quick also in about 5 seconds usually this is make a cup of tea time. But everyone needs a cup of something at 2:00 in the morning.

The more I use it the better I like it. To be honest I had a fanless windows computer at my mount before running APT and Stellarium so the RPi side of it is not a huge must for me but just wanted to see how a £40 computer coped as oppossed to a £400 one. Like I say the more I use it the better I like it just wish it did not crash so much and also I still do not like the planetarium in KStars, I much prefer Stellarium or even CDC.

Anyway see where i get tonight 🙂

Are you doing a bit tonight ?

Steve

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Learning something every night. Now managed to get images of the DSO's up on the KStars planetarium, so while it is still a bit clunky compared to Stellarium but is now very useable and makes framing much easier with these images,

 

Steve

[Adreneline]

1 hour ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Are you doing a bit tonight ?

Well I am but I've copted out tonight and I'm using the ASIair and my NB setup as opposed to Astroberry and my osc.

Like you I used a NUC at the mount (SGPro/BYEos, CdC, PHD2, ASCOM etc.) controlled by Remote Desktop from a laptop indoors before moving to the ASIair. The ASIair is just amazing and I love the way it works seamlessly with SkySafari and I can control it from my iPad - I can be up and running in minutes. Hopefully that will be the case with Astroberry one day!

Good luck and I look forward to following your continued progress and success.

Adrian