Some of you were already aware of IOptron launching their HAE69B mounts with KStars preinstalled on an internal Orange Pi 3 LTS. There is now a standalone unit called the iMate, and some evidence that smaller mounts with the device on board are coming, like a 43B etc. Anyway I have been fiddling with the stand alone unit for about 6 weeks and seem to have got through the initial foibles of set up and have done a test and full capture run with it using KStars. My working notes on it are in this review and comments are welcome:
www.backyardastro.org/topic/5192-ioptron...-box-review-updated/
This post here is specifically about KStars issues though, not the other issues about power, wiring and performance etc. It ships with KStars 3.6.7 running under Debian 11 flavour of Linux. so here are my two questions for here. The first is about updating from 3.6.7, and the second is about issues I have found with 3.6.7.
1. It's not entirely clear how to update KStars. I'd quite like to try the aberration inspector in 3.6.8 and see there is a 3.6.9. beta emerging. IOptron tech support have hinted they want to control the updates, which is a PITA. So far I tried Jasem's Ubuntu repository for 3.6.8 and while I was stuck for a while on signage and security, attaching a lot of allow unauthorised blah flags to the apt commands was able to get stuff, but it did not install right, so (rusty on linux here) I'm guessing that there might be notable structural differences in the way Debian does things. Is anyone aware of a properly set up Debian-friendly repository for KStars that is up to date that I might try? Or am I missing the point completely on how these updates are structured?
2. KStars 3.6.7 is doing two strange things to me meantime. One is that the camera settings seem to get forgotten. So the cooler temp and offset were not remembered between sessions. Is that a bug in 3.6.7? I got the offset remembered by finding and editing the camera config files, but there was no setting for temperature. The other problem I have is with the AF. Once I got the step size right for my SESTO SENSO 2 I got a nice parabola, and a number for the motor step point at the minimum, but the AF routine decided that the "Solution" was the left edge of the test region and went sailing off there. So it always made focus worse. Having written down the minimum point I could of course override that but it means I cannot do any unsupervised AF for now. Am I doing something dumb or is it a bug fixed in 3.6.8 (in which case see Qn 1).
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