Mount aborted. Please restart the process and reduce the speed.

[Mr Frodo 57]

As we have good Stellarmate following on this forum I thought I'd try this query here first.  Has anyone had the above message when polar aligning with stellarmate?

I've been using Stellarmate for several years now and after the initial learning curve have found it to be a great piece of software especially when I can plate solve and put the object of interest right in the middle of the FOV.  There have always been the occasional gremlin but until recently I thought I'd tamed them.  Then after doing the Rowan astronomy upgrade they came back with a vengeance.   first the above message when polar aligning and then Stellarmate would stop tracking for no apparent reason it would also flick the reticle North and South or East and West for no apparent reason but as long as the tracking didn't stop this had no effect on the image.  It's not the Rowan upgrade let me say first and foremost as I disconnected the RPi I'm running stellarmate on and reverted to the handset with no issues whatsoever.  The RPi has been running off an adapter connected to a battery pack up until now but it is now running off the official power adapter as in some testing I have done that performed best of all.

I've seen discussions on the Stellarmate forum but there were no conclusions I could find, and more recent queries on this have not yet been answered.

So does anyone have any idea why polar alignment should fail in this way and why Stellarmate stops tracking randomly?

Thanks for any help offered.

 

 

[Mr Frodo 57]

Update - Problem found and all being well solved.

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ does not have an RTC and so I had added one to maintain the time between sessions especially as WiFi in my backyard can be a bit iffy.  I suspected from comments made about timing of Meridian flips and also electrical noise in the system that it may be something to do with the loss of synchronisation between the RPi and the laptop caused by a glitch with the RTC.  Sure enough when I checked the RPi the date was four days old.  Whilst the RTC worked fine once reset it lost the data overnight.  So I removed it from the RPi and set the RPi to connect via my home hub rather than create a hotspot.  This updated the time and I was able to do a test tracking for 55 minutes without seeing any reference to the horizon limits file nor any reference to align points as the reticle was not moving randomly  any longer the only movement of the reticle on the screen was a 1 pixel twitch where the screen was updating.

I'm not saying this is the answer in all reported cases but if you use an RTC in your RPi it may be worth checking it out.    

I believe in failing the RTC module had created a lot of electrical noise and that is what has caused the PA problem amongst a number of others.  My solution with the PA problem was simply to ignore the reduce speed message and leave it set as it was, I eventually got a PA.  It was only after that I found the problem was with the RTC module. 

Hopefully this will help someone out there with the same problem