Today is the first day I didn't have to use my laptop to control my gear, I replaced it with Rasbperry PI! I purchased the PI along with USB WiFi dongle, and now it's sitting on the roof connected to all my equipment (QSI CCD, HEQ Mount, SX Lodestar, and MoonLite focuser). All the equipment are connected to a powered USB hub which also powers the PI. After installing libindi and all the drivers necessary for my gear, I simply SSHed into the PI and ran INDI server on the default port 7624.

Then I configured Ekos for remote connection and viola I'm connected and now guiding and capturing images of M78! It's very seamless experience as if all the controls are local, but I'm doing it from the comfort of a warm living room!

Anyone else tried INDI with Rasbperry PI?

I tried INDI server on Beaglebone Black. It worked pretty well with ATIK camera. I didn't try it with other gear yet.

milosz

I just received a raspberry pi for christmas. I'm totally newbie, but I would install kstars with Ekos (kstars-bleeding). How could I do this? Thank you in advance !

Well, you wouldn't want to install KDE/KStars/Ekos on the PI. You just need libindi there and then you can use Ekos at your PC/Laptop and connect to the PI via Ethernet/WiFi.

To install on PI


To build any 3rd party driver, simply create a corresponding build directory. For example, to build INDI StarLight Xpress driver

Then you can run INDI server with the SX driver:

This will start INDI server on port 7624 (by default). From Ekos/KStars on your PC/Laptop, you can set the remote host to the IP address of your PI, and port to 7624 and viola!

I added a tutorial on running INDI on Raspberry PI here:

indilib.org/support/tutorials/139-indi-l...on-raspberry-pi.html

I'm actually working on a driver to use the raspberry pi camera as a ccd, and a driver to use the GPIO pins to control an ST4 interface. I have the ST4 driver working (I think), and I think I'm close on the CCD driver.

As the bad weather continues here (for over a month ...), I continue my tests at home. I connected a powered hub on the Raspberry. On this hub, I plugged the Lodestar for autoguiding, the DMK (CCD), the Starlight Xpress filter wheel (to DMK), EQ6 (and HEQ5) mount with a eqdirect cable or a cable connected between the hand controler and PC, and finally a logitech wireless controller. I logged in RPi ad-hoc wireless network in a first time, then rj45.
All my tests worked well with my different configurations (EQMOD, Celestron_GPS, SynScan, wifi or ethernet connection ...) except for one thing: Ekos refuses to open the guide tab. By cons, if I plug the hub directly on the PC (with USB extension cable), the guide tab opens for Lodestar. Where is the problem? Cable, hub (D-Link 7-Port), RPi, driver ... ? Does anyone encountered the same problem?

What's the name you put for the Lodestar in Ekos remote options? It needs to be "SX CCD LodeStar" exactly like that. Check here for more details:

indilib.org/about/ekos/setup.html

Ok, next time I 'll RTFM !

Milosz , I'd like to use a BB or BBB too. Any words of wisdom?

It just works I don't know about Beagle Board (I assume XM) because I didn't try. With Beaglebone Black it works just fine. The CPU is the same architecture as for R Pi, so the binaries from Peter work fine. I think they should work with OpenEmbedded image that is shipped with the board, but I used Ubuntu from Linaro. There is no pre-built image. You have to grab hwpack [1] and rootfs (preferrably 'developer') [2] and using linaro-image-tools [3] create the image for Beaglebone Black. Than you boot from SD card that you used with linaro-media-create (part of image tools). Copy debian packages prepared by Peter (make sure it's armhf) and install it with dpkg. I think some dependencies for INDI are missing, but I just built them on the target. I will try to post detailed step-by-step instructions, but it might take a while. I'm now super busy at work and this will only change around mid March.

[1] snapshots.linaro.org/ubuntu/hwpacks/beaglebone/latest
[2] snapshots.linaro.org/ubuntu/images/developer/latest
[3] launchpad.net/linaro-image-tools & wiki.linaro.org/Linaro-Image-Tools (wiki is a bit outdated, but still valid in the docs part)

Cheers,
milosz

Milosz,
Thanks for the quick reply. I have an original BeagleBone I'd like to use up. I'm waiting, like everyone else, for the BBB's to get back in stock. The BB still has Angstrom Linux which uses a different package system which is lacking key items. I'm in the middle of a compile to build a new kernel and Ubuntu RFS. I'll see how that goes, then try your suggestions as well.

Larry