AZ GTI in EQ Mode general weirdness help requested

[powerlord]

Got a few questions I'm hoping others using it this way can help in, as they are doing my head in a bit.

1. what's up with the direction arrows ? for one target they seem to work as expected - up is up, left is left, etc. Then on the next target its completely different.. left is up diagonal or whatever - do the direction arrows turn into RA and DEC or has something gone weird - I feel like I'm missing something - trying to align it at the start is a lesson in frustration.

2. the align with 2 stars, 2 bright stars, etc - my god how is it chosing that second star ? some sort of 'how to annoy me' algorithm - I use sirius as the first - and I have a sky full of bright potential second stars - but then ones in the list are things like atik which I can barely see.. then trying to align it when the arrows have to be worked out as well - it's a trial too far. And as I only have view of south and south west, all the north and east stuff is out... but there's mars not far from atik - but no.. can't chose mars - align with this one you have to sqint at to see.

3. randomly just won't accept connections from synscan. turn it on/off, clear app, repeat multiple times.. freeze fingers off.. give up. check it an hour later in house and find it now works...arggggggg... any procedure that gurantees connection ?

As you can tell - clear sky tonight, but gave up before I smashed the thing up with a hammer.

[Gfamily]

What's your power supply?  If it's getting intermittent results 'in the field' but consistently working an hour later indoors, it could be that your batteries are dropping voltage in the cold. 

As for the directions - I can't help, except to say that in EQ mode, the two directions will be RA and Declination rather than in Altitude and Azimuth, so the directions of the axes will vary depending on where in the sky you are. 

[powerlord]

1. yup - worked that out later last night in daylight. amazing how much simpler things are when you can see the actual mount! im gonna stick a few bits of luminous tape on the sides of it so I can actually SEE what orientation it's in - which will help a lot.

3. It's weird as I think I was finding the opposite. I am using my own built regulated 12v i kncked up from circuits, old lipos, buck converters. I double checked it last night and it's really stable 12v, But swapping for AAs saw it work more reliably at that point. I'll hook up the oscilliscope tonight and check it out. Maybe it needs a few smoothing capacitors. But it's not had any issues until last night weirdly. And since it has it's own regulators on board taking it down to 3.3v for the ESP32 I can't see why it would be - but worth checking.

2 looks like remaining a mystery

[happy-kat]

Check which wifi channel you are using, there maybe too much wifi noise locally and using a different channel may help

[michael8554]

Most mounts will allow you to choose Alignment Stars, check in the instruction manual.

Worth looking in a Planetarium for stars you can see, and choose them.

Don't use planets for alignment, their position is dynamic and changing all the time, unlike stars.

So hard for the mount's firmware to know precisely where a planet is.

Michael