I Broke Ekos!

[Paul M]

I did! I did!, I think!

So, I've been playing with Astroberry for a week now, waiting for my new cameras to arrive and darkness to return. I've just about got the hang of it, not wanting to spend hours of precious darkness learning the basics.

Last night I was playing with the guiding module, PHD2 and Internal. As I'm using simulated equipment profiles there is a limit to what can be achieved, still I went into the options on the Guiding tab and played with the dithering settings, particularly the unguided dithering setting. Today I started up again and see I've got settings in oposition; trying to guide dither and unguided dither at once so get persistant warning splash on starting Ekos. Unfortunately I can't access the guiding options menu in Ekos any longer. Here is my screen (slight delay as I discover that PRTSC doesn't work with VNC??) : 

That's my guiding tab and the "options" button bottom right doesn't open the advanced options window all of a sudden. I've checked it isn't opening behind other windows or in the background.

I broke it!!

Any ideas, short of reburning the SD card?! 

[endless-sky]

Hi, the same thing happened to me, too: I checked both the guided and unguided dithering. Next time I rebooted, EKOS just kept crashing. I resolved by opening the config file in a text editor and removing the line about the guided dithering (as I don't have an autoguider setup, yet). After that, everything worked fine.

The file should be kstarsrc, found under /home/astroberry/.config

Open it with a text editor and look for this part:

Quote

[Guide]
DECProportionalGain=133.3
DefaultGuideCCD=Guide Simulator
DefaultST4Driver=Telescope Simulator
DitherNoGuiding=true
DitherNoGuidingPulse=3000
DitherPixels=4
DitherSettle=1
RAProportionalGain=133.3

and delete the lines about guided dithering, then save it. You should be able to open EKOS again and set the correct options.

Hope this helps!

[Paul M]

21 minutes ago, endlessky said:

Hi, the same thing happened to me, too: I checked both the guided and unguided dithering. Next time I rebooted, EKOS just kept crashing. I resolved by opening the config file in a text editor and removing the line about the guided dithering (as I don't have an autoguider setup, yet). After that, everything worked fine.

The file should be kstarsrc, found under /home/astroberry/.config

Open it with a text editor and look for this part:

and delete the lines about guided dithering, then save it. You should be able to open EKOS again and set the correct options.

Hope this helps!

Excellent!!

I found the file you suggested and simply changed the guided dither entry from True to False, leaving unguided dithering as true.

Restarted Kstars and Ekos and it's back, like magic!

Many thanks for this, I'd have never thought of looking through 'config files!

Edited June 24, 2020 by Paul M

[endless-sky]

Glad it worked! Yeah, I was pretty desperate when it happened: I was in the middle of a session, outside, in the dark. I said "Hey, let's try dithering!". So I looked for the guiding options and turned both of them on, thinking they both needed to be on to work. Dithering was working, every frame, like I wanted it. Then I did something that made EKOS crash and I couldn't get it to open anymore. Kept getting the error message about both types of dithering couldn't be on at the same time... I was losing precious capturing time!

So I went online and looked for a solution. I knew there had to be a config file, I just didn't know where to look for it. It took me a good 30 minutes to find the locations of the config files from a thread in INDI Forum, but finally I got everything working again.

From that day I keep the experiments during the indoor time! Outside, in the dark, I just stick to what I know that works!