Hello, I've been an Astroberry user for years, worked out lots of little issues many times and its been working great.
In the last week ive noticed my mount not preforming the meridian flip, it counts down, hits the MF process but then I hear the stand only move for a moment and it fails. It will keep failing until it hits the HA limit too, no matter how long I set it for (within reason).
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.482 AEST DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Mount status changed from "Slewing" to "Tracking"
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.483 AEST DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Slew finished, MFStatus "FLIP_RUNNING"
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.503 AEST WARN ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - Meridian flip failed, pier side not changed
[2023-08-16T20:20:42.503 AEST INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.mount] - "meridian flip failed, retrying in 4 minutes"

The only thing I can think of is I was pressing some buttons under the INDI settings for my mount encoders, cant remember exactly what I pressed but I've since purged, set defaults and saved many times trying to fix it.
So a couple of days ago I set everything up inside the garage during the day to try and figure it out and capture some logs.
Tried many times with no success, the HA offset and everything is fine, I can go about an hour past the meridian without colliding into my stand and I tried even at 30mins past the meridian but no joy.

So I bit the bullet and formatted the SD card, installing a fresh copy of Astroberry, setup my networks and updated everything after the install with apt get update and such.
To my dismay I had the exact same issue!!
I thought, its got to be the EQ6R!
Plugged in the EQ6R and updated the firmware on the Motor Controllers, couldnt find anywhere else to restore defaults as I dont have a hand controller, everything is done through the Synscan app on the PC.
Tried again and nothing... was pretty confused and frustrated at this point and gave up for the day.

The next day I thought to reinstall Astroberry again but not do any updates.
Suddenly everything is working !
I tested a meridian flip many times in the garage with 100% success rate.
Slightly confused but happy that I could get back to using the scheduler again I packed up and got ready for tonight.

Dusk hit and I was setup and ready to go.
Booted everything up and I was getting crash after crash. Try to focus, crash. Try to plate solve, crash.
I thought ok lets update it and pray...
Parked the scope and took the Pi4 inside to update.

Booted everything up after the update and no more crashing at all but the damn MF problem is back (pun intended ).

Some things I noticed tonight which were kind of weird. (with a fresh updated install of Astroberry on a 1 month old 8gb Pi4)
1. When plate solving I notice its off by quite a bit which makes me think the stand isnt where it thinks it is 10000 arc sec or so.
2. After syncing 6 points so to have a good alignment model I slewed close to the meridian, the stand started slewing the wrong way, it got close to the star and then hit the HA limit... the alignment was getting my targets within 100arc seconds on the first slew beforehand so the stand should have known better !!
3. After syncing many points I parked the scope and noticed it wasnt exactly pointed at the celestial pole, I believe this has something to do with it, perhaps the encoder settings are off ? ...

What confuses me is that the Astroberry install straight off the downloadable image - with no updates - didnt have a problem with the meridian flip.

I have some logs I can post, of both successful and failed attempts of the flip.

Its never been an issue for years, the HA limits and flip delay arent to blame as ive tried many combinations.
LST was confirmed to be accurate also.

Anyway sorry for the long post but thats my situation at the moment, really hoping someone can help me get to the bottom on it because im totally stumped !

Try this procedure and see if it helps:
stellarmate.com/support/faq/mounts.html?view=faq&faqid=33
Hy

Thanks for the reply, as soon as I woke up I powered up the stand and did the procedure you mentioned but the issue remains.

I tried my 2nd Astroberry Pi4 from my other scope and it had the same issue so its got to be something to do with those encoders or the stand I think.
I have moved and updated the encoder values in the past few days whilst attempting to fix it up, not sure if its written over the default ?

I also turned off the MF and HA limits, slewed to over 1 hour past the meridian and then turned on the flip. The stand starts to flip but then it stops just east of the meridian, fails and wants to wait 4 mins.
I did notice the HA time was -15 mins where the meridian flip was planned for only 3, is this normal ? - Forget that, the screenshot was taken after the flip failed.
This is why I tried slewing well past the HA and enabling the MF.

I may install Astroberry again onto a spare SD card, preform no updates and try the MF again just to see if im going crazy or not
If it works ill check the stand settings in Indi and see if I can spot something.

Quick update.

Installed Astroberry onto a fresh SD card, no updates.
Setup my stand, a dummy camera and tried the MF - Worked.

Took it inside and preformed all updates for the Astroberry.
Plug it back into the stand and tried the MF - Worked.

Pretty confused at this stage so I connected my main Astroberry Pi back in and tried the flip, success.

Not sure whats going on, its good I guess but im not sure why and im expecting it to fail again at some stage.
I will try again with the scope, camera, eaf and everything plugged in and do some scheduled job tests.

With the encoder reset as suggested at the Stellarmate forum, I did not see any changes to the encoder values when I did the procedure, reset as instructed and the flips were failing. I did reboot everything and try again with the same fail.

Hopefully get a clear night tomorrow and can test it under the stars but im really not convinced its fixed yet.


EDIT: Tried a few hours later on a scheduled job with everything connected and no problems so far with the flip.
Might get a chance to give it a real test run tonight, forecast is not the best but im pretty keen to try and make it fail...

Maybe this will help you...

Check in INDI the time & scope location:



These settings must match the time and location in Kstars.
When there is a discrepancy you will get the strangest attempts and failed flips.

Thanks for the reply, I haven't had a chance to run it outside yet but the last few times I tested it out it seem to work ok.
Hopefully it was sorted by the encoder reset, I had tried this before but not the same way as described in the stellarmate forum link posted earlier in the thread.

There's a couple of things I thought could be to blame, about 2 weeks ago I was out at a dark site and had to manually enter the time into the pi4 as it wasn't connecting to my hotspot (my fault).
I doubt this is the problem as the next time I booted up at home it connected to my wifi and updated itself as I had run many sessions since then.
I'm thinking it was more likely I pressed the wrong button with the encoder purge / save under the INDI control when parking one night.

Ill take logs when flipping the next few times incase it happens again.

UPDATE:
Seems to be all working fine, left it unattended last night and it flipped about 3 times whilst running the scheduler.

The encoder reset must have done the trick

Thanks again for all the help!