Hey all, I was trying to get Ekos -- or at least an INDI server -- running on my Windows laptop. I don't really want to work that way long-term, but I am using collimation software for my AT8RC (Innovations Foresight's SkyWave) and it would be really sweet if I could schedule a set of defocused-star captures to appear in a particular folder so that SkyWave can chew on them.

I'm running Windows 11 and downloaded Ubuntu from the Microsoft store. Shockingly, once I added the repos and did the apt-get install for indi and KStars, I was able to just run "ktars" from the command line and the familiar windows appeared on my Windows desktop!

Oboy, thought I, and set up a profile with a ZWO camera. Grabbed my old guide cam (120MC-S), and plugged it in. Nada. Did some reading, installed the appropriate tools to connect Windows USB devices to Ubuntu running under WSL. Now, lsusb shows the ASI 120MC-S connected and when I start the profile a tab appears for the camera...but Ekos (or, more properly, INDI) still can't connect to it.

Any ideas? Anyone else tried this? It would be a nice way to get INDI onto Windows, if I could get it to work. I'm perfectly happy with running indiserver command-line, then running the Windows native KStars/Ekos and connecting to that IP, but I am thinking that if it won't even connect in Ekos, indiserver is not getting that far.

I recognize that I could just run everything on the Pi and set the download folder to a network share on the Windows machine. But wow, does that ever bloat the Ekos capture module download times!

You could look at running VirtualBox on Windows and pass in the USB devices directly. One issue you may find is with the "ephemeral" nature of some USB devices. For example, if you plug a QHY camera into a system, it will be identified as one device, which will cause the firmware to be loaded from udev and then it will show up as a new device. You will have to pass both deviceIds into your VBox image. This happens with network adapters too, a lot of cheap wifi adapters will look like a CDROM/DVD at first to linux and you have to "eject" them for them to show as wifi devices.

Yeah, that's how Jasem set it up some years ago; at one point there was a preconfigured VirtualBox VM with KStars/Ekos loaded into it. It's a good suggestion, but if possible I'd like to implement this with software that's already on the PC side. I guess I've already violated that with usbipd-win.