New user to KStars, Ekos, INDI here. What an awesome idea and thank you all who contribute for making this an option and free!!!!

I am fairly good with python, and seeking some advice on the best way to approach what I'd like to do.

I spend all of my telescope time either searching for, or following up on new minor planets. I'm looking for a way to better automate my searching.

This is the requirement:
1. Slew to target area 1. Take 5 X 1 minute images.
2. Slew to target area 2. Take 5 X 1 minute images
3. Slew back to target area 1, repeat.
4. Slew back to target area 2, repeat.
ect. until have I have done this for each target area 3 times.

I'm not sure that Ekos supports this kind of scripting? I see PyIndi is an option, but I don't see documentation on doing plate solves or auto focusing in PyIndi?

Would I be able to program this kind of behavior in Ekos, or should I look into writing it all in PyIndi?

Thanks!!

I have the indi server working great on a Raspberry PI3 with Ubuntu Mate.
Equipment:
HDX110 (EQMOD)
12" F4 astrograph
ATIK 414EXM

Hello and welcome to INDI forums. You can probably use Ekos Scheduler to achieve this, have you tried it?

Hello,

In your situation, you want to configure the scheduler manually for all possible requirements first to master it.

Indeed you will see that it is flexible and robust enough for what you need, but you will probably want to automate the creation of scheduler XML files from official sources too, and that's where your competence in python will be useful.

You can configure your captures independently from the schedules with the capture panel. You can create a "take 5x60s lights" and reuse that afterwards for any target. This means you can have a schedule+capture saying "point to the wall flat-panel and take 30x40K-ADU flats" as generic first step of your schedule session.

In any case, the limit is that you will need to start and feed Ekos with the xml files at some point, that is, schedule the scheduler files in the scheduler if there is a way to provide that configuration to KStars upon startup, I'm not aware of it.

The other limit will be where resulting captures are stored. You will need to find a way to recover those outputs to process them further.

-Eric

-Eric

Very interesting topic.
As I would like to bypass completely ekos/kstars I was curious about wether it would be possible to use autofocus and plate solver with pyindi ?

If no, why, and what part of indi should I write additional wrapper for ?

autofocus and plate solver are functions of Ekos, not INDI. If you want to bypass Ekos, you have to implement these functions yourself.

Thank you for the prompt response.
I did not took a look into ekos source code yet, but is there a chance that some low level functionality may be accessible through python wrappers ?
Like for instance fwhm estimation from image or astrometry ?

If not, I'll see in the future if I can take some of those out of ekos (or build my own) and build a wrapper around it using pybind11 (which I find a bit more convenient than swig)