I am trying to figure out how to set up non guided dithering with this mount.
Apparently it can't be pulse guided and only via an ST4 cable can guiding be done I am not sure why.
But due to its encoders and focal lengths I use 135-400mm for my portable widefield setups I have no need for a guide camera of scope as my stars are pinpoint for all the exposures that I have done and require.
Is there way to do dithering with this, the natural drift of the mount I don't think is sufficient enough to 'naturally dither' over the course of exposures.

Ive seen that you can in the guide module but am not sure if my mount qualifies for that?

Hello Abdi,

I had the same question and just came across your post. May I ask if you ever got this working and if so how? This is the procedure I tried:

- Check "Non-Guide Dither Pulse" in the Ekos Guide Module options dialog and set the time as required
- Set "AstroTrac" in the "Guide via" box of the Optical Trains settings dialog, which should send the dither pulse commands directly to the mount. (The optical train settings dialog can be opened by clicking on the pencil icon to the right of the optical train that's currently selected in the Guide module).

That's where I ran into problems. The dither pulses are sent to the AstroTrac INDI driver correctly but they have no effect because the guide rate for the mount is initialized to zero and this value can't be changed in the INDI control panel. This might be a bug or perhaps I have just misunderstood how to enable this feature.

In any case, I made some local code changes to the AstroTrac driver and was able to get non-guided dithering to work with my mount. I have submitted a pull request to have this behavior reviewed but perhaps code changes aren't really necessary if you already found a better way.

Hi

I don’t think i got it to work to be honest, are you trying to send dither pulses through to the mount directly?

Or via st4 connection and guidecam.

I think that’s the issue the mount only accepts pulses through the st4 connection and i don’t think i saw a change in the mount with the same method you describe.

How have you modified the code to allow that.

Id love to try it out , ive been using the am5 for some things but theres no comparison in quality of the subs on the astrotrac but little things like this make the final data potentially limiting to process.

It would be great if you would also test the update! I just modified the INDI driver to also send guide pulses directly to the mount so no update of the astrotrac firmware is required.

The updated driver is already available on the INDI master branch. Are you able to build INDI from source for your platform?

I can test it,

If i update the indi files through “ update_indi_core” via terminal would that work.

I am not a programmer but I am aware of compiling source code but haven’t done so before.

Regards

Yes update_indi_core should be enough

After the update, open the INDI control panel and under "Motion Control" you should see "Guide Rate" settings for N/S and E/W at the very bottom of the tab. If these settings aren't visible then the latest version was not installed. The default rate is currently set to 0.1x, which apparently matches the default guide rate of the ST-4 interface but it might make sense to change the default to 0.5x in the future. In any case, you can change the default settings and just for testing I would recommend 0.5x or higher plus a relatively long dither pulse (set in the EKOS Guide module options) to see visible movement in the images.You'll need to experiment to find the best settings for your particular equipment and imaging use case.