John Scherer replied to the topic 'Support for ArduHeater in INDI' in the forum. 2 years ago

I do have 4 PCB's for these if anyone is interested. I just ask to cover postage. I will say that for reasons I'm not quite sure of, I can't send mail to Australia, unless I ship it "Priority Overnight Express" which for this $5 PCB would cost about $80 USD.

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John Scherer replied to the topic 'Support for ArduHeater in INDI' in the forum. 2 years ago

Thanks Grimaldi. I'm not in a huge hurry, as anything, the sooner the better but I'll take what ever I can get ;-) I've seen the protocol.cpp file but sadly I'm no software developer. I can compile code for just about any linux project out there, been doing that sort of thing for decades, just never go into actually writing my own code. The process in general does seem fairly straight forward though thanks to the example driver you linked to. Mostly just a mater of re-implementing the command structure and the command response from protocol.cpp to the usb_dewpoint.cpp file?

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John Scherer created a new topic ' Support for ArduHeater in Indi' in the forum. 2 years ago

I've used an open source, 4-channel PWM dew heater called Arduheater for a few years. His original post on this project was back in 2017 on Stargazers lounge.  Of all the opensource ones out there, this one is quite complete and well documented and even has PCB files to have them produced, which I did.  The author JBrazio, has Arduino source code , and the Windows GUI program in C#.  If anyone could add support to this to indi I would be forever grateful, and in your debt.  I could ditch windows altogether!  I have a few blank PCB's left over and I'd be happy to provide one, heck, I'd even build you a complete one.

-John
 

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John Scherer created a new topic ' Good overview of meridian flip' in the forum. 2 years ago

Losmandy released a YouTube video recently in which they interview a guy by the name of Edward Plumer. He talks about is observatory and and other equipment (a Losmany GM11 mount as you might have guessed) and then gives a really nice overview of what exactly a meridian flip is and why we do them..  He goes into some detail on it and while it might be basic knowledge to many of you, It was a good learning experience for me, and I thought others might enjoy it as well.  The entire video is over 2.5 hours long and this link is to that part where he starts talking about it.  The video is here ..

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John Scherer replied to the topic 'Partitioning the Scheduler code' in the forum. 4 years ago

This is a somewhat old thread but I wanted ask, with the ongoing rewrite of Scheduler, I wondered if some thought has been given to being able to submit schedules to ekos running on a remote Raspberry pi, from Ekos running remotely on my laptop? That way the job would be processed on the pi, not locally on my laptop.

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Wanted to point out that it looks like they are making big changes to the Scheduler itself: indilib.org/forum/development/5137-parti...-scheduler-code.html

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dmsummers wrote: Hi JRS,
Maybe my question is better stated as a "wish" for Ekos to evolve towards a server architecture so that real-time planetarium/planning functions could be fully separated from remote scheduling/sequencing/device control. These two functions really do seem best solved on different computing platforms....laptop/tablet (astronomer) and remote Pi4 (telescope/gear) respectively. Maybe someday, after I get more familiar with the development environment, I can look at the "Tool" definition for Ekos within Kstars and play with this concept. On the other hand, by the time we have Pi-5/6, the performance will be so good that it won't matter any more. Until then, thanks for the chat and....clear skies...


Yes! I was thinking about this after re-reading your question. Some of the functionality really needs to be more Client/Server oriented. It would be great if the scheduling functions could simply point to a database on the pi, and a process on the Pi that would monitor jobs in the database. Feature request Jasem?

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I thought it was laggy with VNC at 1080P so at 4K, I can't imagine ;-) Are you using WIFI or Ethernet?

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In further digesting your questions, with regards to running scheduled jobs in kstars/ekos locally on your laptop and all the hardware connected to the remote Pi4, I believe that putting the laptop to sleep would stop the processing of those jobs. As I understand it, the processing of those jobs would be done locally on the laptop. I'm sure someone else will clarify this.

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Think of it like this, there are three pieces to this ecosystem, Indilib, Ekos, Kstars. Indilib handles anything to do with physical hardware, mounts, cameras, etc. Ekos is at its heart, controller/monitor of this hardware. Its the piece that lets you deal with focus, guiding, aligning, and scheduling. Kstars is really just planetarium software. Its a little more complicated than this because Ekos is integrated into Kstars and not a separate piece of software that you can run independently, but logicically they are very distinct in function.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying this but hopefully this helps.

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Hi Doug,

kstars/ekos is a lot to grasp! In your local (laptop) ekos profile, when you select remote host, any indilib request for hardware by ekos or kstars (or any indilib client) be it a camera, telescope mount, gps, weather sensor, etc, are all forwarded over the network to the remote instance of indilb. kstars and ekos are still running locally.

If you had all your hardware directly connected to your laptop, you would then select local, and all the indilib device requests would be handled by the local indilib server.

I noticed the same thing as you. A VNC connection to the pi4 with kstars was not the best and performance really suffers. I removed kstars from the startup script on the Pi4, no need to have it running for my needs.

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