Thanks for your reply. Right now i am downloading the index files but it takes forever with a limited bandwidth and i will give it another shot.
If the offline plate solve fails, and i believe it will from what you have written, my options are to use a windows mini-pc in order to do the initial polar alignment. I looked for a version of EQMod for ubuntu but i only managed to find the driver and not the graphic environment i am used to work with. A final option is to find an app for my cell phone that has a polar alignment tool (an app that shows the polar finder view in order to do a PA) for the skywatcher mount but so far i have managed to find for the new polar finders that come with the new mounts skywatcher has and at my HEQ5 pro i have the old one, does skywatcher make new polar finders for the old mounts? Are the new polar finders compatible with the old mounts? It's a shame that there is no visual tool to do polar alignment at Ekos

I recently bought a RPI 3 B+ but later on i found out that there is no compatible version of Ubuntu for that board in order to run KStars/Ekos or is there a way to run Ubuntu on that board that i missed?

Let me first say that Indi and Ekos work exceptionally well once you have found out the limitations and have adapted to them. It was a steep learning curve for me as well, but now that I have adapted my hardware and my expectations to what the system can do I do not want to miss them for all the tea in China. Jasem and the team are constantly improving the software, so stay with it.

First, the problem you are having with polar alignment is that you have a very narrow FOV with your RC8". That's why I was not successful aligning with it, either. The OA of my RC8" is not directed at the NCP due to cone error, therefore the alignment repeatedly failed, not because plate solving failed, that worked just fine and fast, too, but because the NCP must be within the FOV for the polar alignment tool to work. It worked when I used my guide scope (280mm focal length) and set that so that the NCP was within the initial FOV. So nothing wrong with the alignment tool, but you really have to fine tune your mount to work within the designated parameters and that becomes increasingly difficult the smaller the FOV is. The cone error of my RC8" on my mount is approximately 1.5 degrees after perfect collimation and I have not corrected that yet, because it really only comes into play anyway if I want to polar align using Ekos. Otherwise plate solving corrects for it within the first pass.
So I would assume that you will have the same problems with a Windows PC using the polar alignment tool. The narrow FOV is the main problem.

But perhaps I did something else wrong, so Jasem, please correct me, if I am writing nonsense here.

For you perhaps the Polemaster would be the right fit. That has a much larger FOV and it is firmly attached to the axis of your mount, so no flexure issues. It works, but as I wrote, I went back to optically polar aligning, because that is just very fast. I am usually done within 90 s at most, and I can do it about 10-15 min earlier while there is still twilight than using the Polemaster or Ekos, for which it needs to be much darker. Visually you can distinguish Polaris a lot sooner than the cameras can.

As for a Cell phone app for polar alignment, I am using PS Align on my iPhone. Simple, but perfectly capable of doing everything I need. Or what you would need, provided your polar scope has polar circle with 10' increments like the one on my Orion Atlas Pro mount.

www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&...ust=1532961577994469

The alignment I routinely get with this is so good, I see no field rotation in up to 5 min exposures and more is just not feasible from my location within a light polluted city. Maybe with narrowband imaging, but I am just getting into that myself.

No Ubuntu image yet for the 3+, but will surely come soon:

My favorite mini-PC for running Ubuntu and KStars is this: www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/pi332

That works like a charm, although I had to attach cooling fins to it, so it does not overheat in our brutal Texas summers. If you have $180 to spare, I would strongly recommend this mini-PC, as I can vouch that it works with Ubuntu MATE installed directly on the integrated 32 GB eMMC. The 5GHz wireless makes for very fast connectivity to your tablet or laptop for control by VNC and the 2 USB3 ports make for fast connection to your mount, camera and an external USB3 2.5" hard drive that I use for capturing planetary video using Planetary Imager (also run on this mini-PC in parallel with KStars. Makes planetary work simple and painless). It is insignificantly larger than a Pi3, but MUCH more powerful and plate solves about 5-10 times faster than the Pi3.

Check out the astrophotos under my profile, they were all collected using either a Pi3 or the Zotac.

The only thing I need to do these days is polar align my mount, and after that I will be inside the house running the entire session remotely from my desktop or iPhone using a VNC app.

This works really great! Don't give up! Making it work for you is part of the fun of this hobby.

Best

Jo

i finally managed to download all the index files for the solver. In order to save space at the sd card i want to coy them at a usb stick and set the solver to look for the index files at the stick. Where do i do that i looked at every screen but i couldn't find anything

The location of the index files is specified in the file /etc/astrometry.cfg via the add_path parameter.

SUCCESS!!! I managed to make the offline plate solver to work. The problem is that when i disconnect the devices and stop INDI some of the settings are reset and need to be re-entered again. More specifically at the telescope simulator (and possibly when there is a real mount connected) at the option tab the scope properties are reset, this does not always happen. Also at the CCD Simulator (and possibly at a real camera) at the simulator config tab the CCD Y Pixel size always resets to 5.2. When i noticed this at both the simulator profiles and corrected it, the offline plate solver works flawlessly. For the atik 383l+/RC8 simulation profile the plate solve finishes in 24 secs for bin 1x1.

On another note i don't have a Raspberry Pi2 but a 3 model B yay

Congratulations! 24s is pretty fast solving for the Pi3. Maybe I can improve my own settings to make it faster.
As for saving the parameters, there is an option to load/save the parameters under the telescope and CCD tabs. There should be no need to reenter them again every time. They autopopulate correctly for me every time I connect to Indi. But you may have to go to Option>Save.

Great! And yes, make sure to save the options as El Corazon suggests.

i return to this topic in need of help since i spent a lot of time in the cold trying to figure this out and i am very frustrated and sorry if am rambling. the plate solver does not work, out of the blue, even the online simulator does not work, the solver keeps failling and i have no idea why.

What i have noticed are the following
1) I have the astrometry files installed at a usb flash drive but at the alignment configuration screen the index files are not checked even though they exist at my usb drive, i tried at all of the pi's usb ports but i have the same result. one thing i noticed is that when i open the usb drive from the file exploree i have a KIngston, Kingston1 and Kingston 2 drives is that normal?

2)when i polar align i get the message that the index files 4201 to 4207 are missing but i have the path to my usb unchanged

3) i tried logging the whole process but i am not sure if i did it correct so i include a log file, by looking at the log file i came upon this entry

CCD Simulator : "Error: Invalid range for Width (WIDTH). Valid range is from 1 to 1280. Requested value is 3362 "

the atik 38l+ has an image size of 3362x2504 is there something wrong?

Shouldn't the astrometry files be checked?

Re 1) no this isn’t normal. It happens when Linux “thinks” there was already a file system called Kingston and then the USB stick is inserted. It will then mount the USB as Kingston1. Apparently this has happend at least another time since now also Kingston2 was mounted.

When you boot your RPi3 WITHOUT THE USB STICK ATTACHED what do you see when you type

mount

? Also, does the file manager show a device or file system called Kingston? If yes, then this may indicate a system misconfiguration.


Wouter

Take two. I installed ubuntu and kstars/indi/ekos and did a simulation test without any equipment and only with the online solver and the result is the same, the solver fails to solve the image. As for the usb stick issue since i installed ubuntu again i haven't seen this again.

i include screenshots of my simulation setup and todays log files. I use Kstars
Build: 2018-08-18T08:14:53Z,
KDE Frameworks 5.18.0
Qt 5.5.1 (built against 5.5.1)

Can you post screen shots of the alignment tab of Ekos and the three option tabs when clicking Options in the lower right of the alignment tab please?


Wouter