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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

INDIDUINO/indi-duino/INDUINO

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Guilty as charged! Melbourne SQM 18.2 skies on a good night, but that's life near a big city.

So that was YOUR project! Impressive! I'd seen it and contemplated building it before I invested in a Ultimate Power Box V2 to cover both focuser and dew control - but in hindsight my $900+ would have been better spent on Arduino, if only I had the insights I do now. The whole Arduino thing seems so daunting from the outside - hence the desire to better document it.

As the kstars/EKOS/INDI software side is getting to a degree of maturity that's closer to commercial (and based on my recent experience with TheSkyX - BETTER than most commercial software) it's time to tidy up some of the legacy/unsupported hardware projects surrounding it and make it just as easy and robust for people to kit out the rest of their astro gear.

Keep sharing away and well done!
3 years 7 months ago #58112

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I'm just outside Brisbane.
I was running the whole ASCOM, SGP, PHD2 etc stack previously. That worked pretty well for extended parties (eg Qld Astrofest) but the need to have a Windows Laptop involved didn't fit when I setup my little observatory. I looked at the Pi sometime back but didn't get all of the pieces together. The shutdown gave me some extra time to revisit that (saving an hour and a half to two hours a day not commuting is pretty nice). I came across Astroberry and have been loving the integration of the Kstars/Ekos/Indi stack.

The basics work very well although regular use has exposed shortfalls in my kit, a new ASI camera is on it's way as my old Canon 550D cameras are starting to show their age. I'm keen to automate the bad weather detection, close up the observatory thing as my work hours don't fit well with late nights.

Bob
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3 years 7 months ago #58113

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Jealous - love Brisbane (family up there and used to have a house up near Fraser Island myself - will get back there one day).

Yes, Im a UN*X/MacOS guy - not a fan of Windows at all so jumped directly to Stellarmate based on the recommendation from a bloke up in Cairns. Fought my way through using it with an old LX-90, gave up and went down the EQ6R then EQ*R path (and now a Paramount ME - this hobby will kill ya!).

Like you, I can't afford to stay awake all night baby sitting an imaging run. You need WeatherRadio in your life! Roughly $100-200 in parts depending on sensors and housings - add in a few bucks more for a Davis anemometer and $100 for the RG-11 and you've got a rock-solid little system. The housing is the pain. The only alternative I would recommend is the AAG - simply if you don't have time to mess around making your own housings.

When you have five minutes maybe we can pull what we know together into a (hopefully) useful How (and where) To guide.
3 years 7 months ago #58114

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Time for an update on my progress.
I've discovered that the 16 channel relay board I've been working with to control the roof of the observatory is not electrically isolated from the control circuitry despite having opto-isolators on the control pins. The smaller variants of the board are/can be fully isolated. All worked well on the table in the house but when combined with the observatory I think it set up some ground loops that somehow crashed most of the rest of the observatory. Sigh. Some days of wondering how much gear had been toasted. After a lot of fiddling everything except my home assembled Eqdirect cables appears to working again (which had me really concerned for the mount).

Bluetooth connection for the mount is good though. My first attempts at using bluetooth for the mount control had not gone well with guiding going haywire (I had used bluetooth years ago under Ascom but could not recall how much guiding I was doing at that stage). I found a note that a management module could play havoc with bluetooth serial connections, removed the module (and now can't find the step in my history).

The roof controller is currently running using a single push button to toggle it's state while I wait for a Wifi variant of the Arduino Mega to replace the standard mega I'm using to control the relays. Simplifies the open and close steps.

I've also been trying to introduce myself to the ESP8266 Di Mini modules. Ages spent trying to get the drivers to work and then it just worked on one PC so I'm not sure what that is about.
I'm currently working on using one as a replacement for the bluetooth module I'm using for Eqmod (mostly because I know how to do it with bluetooth so the number of variables is reduced). They look promising as way of doing connections without USB cables everywhere and the risk of odd currents causing havoc. Other than the 3.3V issue with the pins the modules look like they would be a good alternative to Arduinio's for most of my applications (adding in voltage level shifters is an additional complication ).
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3 years 7 months ago #58467

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xthestreams, do you have a suggestion on a particular WeatherRadio build? The most promising site that I found appears to have had it's links hijacked by an asian porn site.
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3 years 7 months ago #58951

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Interesting observation on the relay board - I have been having "interesting" experiences with the 8 way module I purchased from jay car for testing - I didn't have high hopes to be honest! Getting Wifi working on Arduino seems to be a dark art, I can't say I've quite mastered it yet!

Keep us posted!
3 years 7 months ago #58952

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I'm glad you liked it! I needed to find a way to make a few bucks during the lockdown! ;-)

Seriously, and this is just one of the parts that isn't obvious - GitHub!

GO to the indiuino page and Wolfram has done a great job of trying to get his personal project into something relatively replicable by a third party.

github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty/blob/ma...adme-WeatherRadio.md

As mentioned at the start of this thread, the Arduino/open-source hardware part of the astro/INDI world needs some organisation - it's mostly all these, once you know where to look - but requires some serious Googlefu and, at least in my case, resulted in a lot of wasted effort trying older unsupported projects where ea better alternative is already available!
3 years 7 months ago #58953

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I seem to be collecting a multitude of ESP8266 based boards (and some ESP32 boards on order) on the basis that some people seem to be able to make them work. It is a dark art though.
I can get the boards to connect to my home wifi when they are attached to the USB device but not when I power via other means and in the case of the Arduino Mega with the onboard ESP8266 module similar but that's based on DIP switches.
Still experimenting in that space as a Wifi module that needs to be powered via the USB seems unlikely.

I'm pondering modifying a sketch that connects and add an interface to a serial LCD screen to see if that gives me a better idea what's happening when the USB is not connected.

I've not yet located a basic sketch to use the modules as a serial pass through that gives me any confidence that it will work. The esp-bridge may do what's needed but I'm still trying to get my head around what they are doing, use of AVRDUDE is different to what I was expecting.
3 years 7 months ago #58954

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xthestreams, based on the description under your alias you might have a better idea than me. Is this an appropriate forum for discussions around hardware such as the ESP range? It does seem relevant but also a bit of a tangent.
3 years 7 months ago #58955

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Sorry for the delay Bob. Right now it's as good a place as any - again, I am thinking we need a dedicated hardware section to talk about these things. Stargazer's Lounge has a fairly vibrant community chat going there with people like Gina sharing her experience in getting this stuff working, and I see no reason not to follow suit here.

As you've worked out yourself, the Arduino space is not so much poorly documented as that the documents that are there assume a lot fo prior knowledge/experience and those lovely Uno+WiFi boards that you and I both got drawn to work well enough o give you hope but not so well that your project gets finished (or at least not quickly). Opensource is free so long as you time isn't worth anything is how the saying goes, and in this case it's been true - I could have easily purchased an AAG CloudWatcher for the amount of money I've misspent on the wrong boards, wrong project, wrong sensors and then to be left with a device that would not look out of place in Frankenstein's labs, well it's not always as satisfying as you would hope.

Then there's my little Flip Flat/Flat Man clone which worked great right out fo the box and saved me $800 - so you win some, you lose some.

Long way of saying, let's keep the conversation going - I'll see if we can add a section for INDI hardware that can be broken up into sections to keep things a little easier to find.
3 years 6 months ago #59204

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Thanks. I like the idea of a hardware section.
A little bit of possible learnings about my Ebay version of the Wemos D1 Mini board and my attempts to use it as a serial bridge.
I found elsewhere mention of 470ohm resistors in the TX and RX lines on the Wemos D1 mini boards hindering comm's through those pins. My boards hava 220ohm resistors. I've been experimenting trying to communicate through the pins, via a level shifter then via a Sparkfun FTDI board on one side and a Telnet session to the board over Wifi. I get one way comm's with that setup.
Stuff I type into the Telnet session shows in the serial monitor but not the other way. If I'm using the USB port on the ESP8266 I get two way comm's.
I'm suspecting that the issue is that the signal coming from the FTDI board via the level shifter and into the ESP8266 board via the resistor may not be sufficient (either that of a problem with the hookup of the level shifter). I'm also noticing that the ESP only shows as connected to my router some of the time even when the telnet is working. That was a lot confusing.

I have the Jaycar version o fthe board somewhere (but not sure where at the moment). When I find it I'll check the resistor values in the TX and RX lines and see if they are any different.
Edit - the Jaycar duinotech ESP8266 board has 470ohm resistors in the RX and TX path to the pins on the header. Testing against the terminals on the module itself though I'm wondering if those are pull down or pull up down in some way. Very low resistance between them on one side and the resistance between the module and the terminals is low.

Another edit. I'm now got two way communications between Serial Monitor and a Telnet session on both the ebay board and the Jaycar version. I swapped the signal from the RX pin on the ESP8266 to the TX channel on the level shift module (eg both TX and RX go via the labelled TX channels on the level shift board which does not make much sense to me).
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Last edit: 3 years 6 months ago by Bob Stephens.
3 years 6 months ago #59205

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Awesome news, I might need to pick you brains on this - I couldn't ever get teh Jaycar Arduino + WiFi board to do what I needed it to do, I suspect you found the problem, but I might have misunderstood.
3 years 6 months ago #59298

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