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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

What's next for EKOS?

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I'm not convinced Trevor is the key to getting the word out. This community needs to be posting about their own successes on the various astronomy forums and their own websites. If people only post here, word does not get out beyond the community already using it. As people begin to see the successes others are having, they will be willing to give the software their attention.

As for documentation. A WIKI style system where users can contribute would be great. The wiki could be subdivided by EKOS panels, and then sections within those panels, and there could be another area which provides walkthroughs in setting up your equipment, first time use, recommended order of operations, remote operations, etc.

I've written a few articles on my own site, and would be willing to contribute this content where applicable.

Overview of EKOS on the Mac

Using EKOS to capture the Wizard Nebula
The following user(s) said Thank You: Alfred, Jose Corazon
5 years 6 months ago #29825
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Replied by Jose Corazon on topic What's next for EKOS?

I agree for the most part. The primary objective should be to put together a Wiki that lays out the overall strategy and a boiler plate approach to get basic images very quickly. That is the part where one loses new users fast. If the hurdles are too high or if there are too many bugs then people get frustrated and abandon EKOS. If success arrives quickly, that will boost excitement and keep them interested, Then they can be gradually introduced to the more complex steps including automation using the scheduler. I cannot stop emphasizing how important that is for me, who has a professional life and cannot afford prolonged sleep deprivation. That will be another sizeable fraction of future users, so a well functioning scheduler would be a HUGE attraction over any other more basic software that does not have that functionality.

Apart from that, I still think that Trevor would be a perfect conduit to get the word out. He has worked hard and put together a fantastic blog and YouTube channel that by now reaches 10s of thousands of people. Most of those may never have heard of EKOS or consider the entry effort too high. Those we have to reach and once there is a critical mass then word of mouth will do the rest. Currently, we do not yet have that critical mass.

Do not underestimate the power of advertising.

Jo

PS: By the way, Andrew, that is a fantastic website you set up and shared with us! Jasem, you may want to feature a link to Andrew's MacObservatory somewhere prominent.
Last edit: 5 years 6 months ago by Jose Corazon.
5 years 6 months ago #29839
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Replied by Alfred on topic What's next for EKOS?

I would like to caution everybody with regard to reaching out to "influencers". IMO Ekos currently isn't in a mature enough state to make prominent people have a close look at it. Considering my own personal list of things to do/fix (let alone the numerous problems others are experiencing in addition to mine) I would hesitate to reach out prematurely.

At least the basic tasks have to work reliably. Otherwise the verdict won't be pretty. For instance, standard equipment like DSLRs (in partucular Canon DSLRs as they are broadly used in astronomy) should work reliably which they currently don't. Guiding is another basic task. As it is now, calibration is unreliable (won't calibrate with subframe enabled). Also, exceeding the limit on guiding deviation currently resets capture count to zero which may cause a sequence to run forever. This would make Ekos look like it was in alpha state. Things like that must not occur when Ekos is being tested by an influencer.

Although I don't consider it basic, Ekos' GUI should look good when it is run on a 4k screen as most of these high-profile guys own the latest computer hardware.

With all that being said, Ekos is second to none or the clear leader in other fields. I realize my assessment might sound harsh but in fact I prefer Ekos over ANY other software. Otherwise I wouldn't be here all day long :-)
5 years 6 months ago #29840
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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic What's next for EKOS?

There is a manual for KStars: docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-edu/kstars/index.html

Sure it needs some updating, but it covers most of KStars. For Ekos, there is documentation here: stellarmate.com/support/ekos.html

The video in that link gives a quick overview of Ekos..etc. It would be great if the community can come up with their own guides and documentation, we'd love to host those here. Maybe I should create a Wiki to make this more accessible to edit and add info.
5 years 6 months ago #29847
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There is a lot of documentation but it's mostly about the Ekos workflow and not about how to actually get to that point. Additionally it's widely spread over several places. As someone who is just starting with the INDI/Ekos system I can say that I missed three things in the documentation:
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1. A big picture and overview that gradually goes into the details.

What is the history of the system? Which software components are involved? What is connected to what? What goes where? What does the client do in the process, what the server? What is the role of KStars? And also simple things like: When I press "Save Config" in the INDI window, where does it actually get stored? Server? Client? Globally or per user? Where in the file system? And so on. A lot of this seems undocumented or hidden somewhere and every single new user has to do a lot of research by himself to get a hang of the system as a whole.

As an example: This config thing was surprisingly hard to decipher for me even though I'm a developer and a long time Linux user. I saw a possible solution in a forum post for one of my problems. Great. This required a change in a config file but where is it? I did find it in the end but it was not where I was expecting it. Will a typical Windows user starting with Linux and INDI find it without help? I don't think so.

2. Troubleshooting guidelines.

There a a lot of great tutorials out there but they all assume that everything works right out of the box. They all have a running system to start with and take it apart to create a list of steps to follow. That's fine as long as it works.

But when a user encounters a problem with his particular setup then he is on his own. This can be very frustrating, especially if he is not a computer nerd. The INDI users and the developers spend a lot of time to help users on this forum and they are doing a fantastic job. But I think that this community is still not big enough to ensure reliable support for a beginner who is trying to get things working in the middle of the night. Having to wait for the next clear night to test a proposed solution can be very stressful and could be held against INDI. So a easy to find list of common errors with easy to follow solutions would be very useful. The current FAQ is a good start.

One problem is that many troubleshooting solutions still require changes to the source code of INDI, Ekos or to it's dependencies. That is the nature of things, I know. But the user has to get the code from somewhere, unpack/merge it, change the actual code, compile everything and install it afterwards. And don't forget to restart the server after every change. Most of this has to be done on the command line, maybe even over SSH in the middle of the night.

This is not a problem for me but I don't think that you'll get Youtube influencers like Trevor to SSH into his control box and compile gphoto2 and it's dependencies to enable support for his camera in the middle of the night (like in my case). And if it's enabled then he would still have to solve the gphoto2 INDI configuration page quest...

3. Driver documentation.

That brings me to my third point. Some of the driver parameters are self explaining but many of them are not (at least for a beginner). Some drivers have an absurd amount of parameters where some of them seem to be redundant and others are ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that they aren't if you already know what they are doing but all of this may be extremely overwhelming for a newcomer, especially when he uses a particular device or device class for the first time. For a simple setup with mount, guide scope, camera and focus motor the user may end up looking at a hundred or more parameters to control. That's a lot.

These parameters have to be there, of course. But I think they are way to cluttered. One thing that would help is to visually sort the parameters into categories. I'm not talking about abandoning the tab page layout. Just add different background colors to parameters, use special icons or something like that. Also detailed tooltips with explanations would be very helpful for a beginner (looking at Siril here). This could be part of the INDI protocol so every client may reuse the same help text.

One category should definitely contain the volatile parameters that will be remotely changed from Ekos or other clients and thus are not stored in the config. This was really irritating to me at first because the dialog was randomly changing the values that I just entered to something completely different all by itself until I realized that it just was Ekos doing it's thing in the background.

The other setup parameters could be marked as required one time setup parameters, parameters that are changed on a regular basis and parameters that are only read back from the driver (these should be clearly marked as read only).

Parameter preset sets that can be shared online would be great too. Eg the gphoto2 driver would benefit a lot if people could just share working parameter sets for different cameras directly in a Wiki.

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I'm not demanding anything, this are just some random thoughts from a new user. INDI with Ekos is a fantastic system with a lot of power but it also has a very steep learning curve, especially if you are just a photographer and not a computer minded administrator or developer of some sort.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq, John Scherer, Greg, Jose Corazon
5 years 6 months ago #29853
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Replied by John Scherer on topic What's next for EKOS?

I completely agree, RoMe. Your experience mirrors mine. There is some good information on kstars/indi/ekos out in the wild, but its scattered all over the place. I really love this suite of applications, but man it can sure be frustrating at times ;-)
5 years 6 months ago #29854
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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic What's next for EKOS?

Ok, so what do you guys propose? Should I create a Wiki and someone from the community manages that? Anyone wants to take a more active approach at documentation? I'm open to suggestions to make users experience smoother.

EDIT: I'll lock this topic now since it diverted quite a bit from the original topic, please open a new topic for documentation.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jose Corazon
Last edit: 5 years 6 months ago by Jasem Mutlaq.
5 years 6 months ago #29855
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