Once I get some free time, I might try to make a driver that will work. Got a lot of other personal projects going at the moment. I'll need to read up a lot on the Alignment Subsystem, but it looks doable.

All the help is *greatly* appreciated! I just informed Fabrizio and Pawel who worked on this driver about this thread, so hopefully you'll get some useful feedback soon as I don't know much about the internals of the driver.

I have a CGX as well and can assist you with any troubleshooting. I also have some slight abilities to read and comprehend code... I do not know if I have the math or skill set but am willing to help in any way I can.

Jim

Sounds good Jim. I'll reach out once I have something kinda working.

And I can help test the AVX. It seems to respond to the current driver, similar to the CGX.

Hello all,

I have already extended the driver for EQ mounts. It needs testing. Just the time to upload it to my forked indi-3rdparty. Just to avoid duplicated efforts.

Hey Fabrizio, where is the latest version hosted? Because the latest changes I see in master are from months ago.

github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty/tree/master/indi-celestronaux

Hi,
here there is the new version of the driver.

This version adds:
1. Eq support: mount type selection button in mount info tab.
The selection button instructs the alignment subsystem to cope with Altaz or Eq mount.
2. Enabled tracking management, formerly it was disabled.
In INDI mount control tab tacking ON/OFF buttons are enabled.

A few words about the alignment procedure.

1. Power on sync: this is the first manual sync operation.
First, put you scope in some known position with respect to the scope mount. Tipycally by using marks on scope axes. At this point, before version 3.5.0 of Kstars, it was needed to manually compute the celestial RA/DEC coordinates corresponding to this initial scope position. In fact, Kstars < 3.5.0 allowed only to sync to RA/DEC coordinates, a quite unfriendly feature, at least for me. So, I extended Kstars sync capabilities to ALT/AZ and HA/DEC coordinates that are terrestrial frame coordinates indepentent of sidereal time with fixed values for each fixed scope position. This feature is merged in Kstar 3.5.0.
Another added feature to 3.5.0 is coordinates value conversion when changing the coordinate type among RA/DEC, ALT/AZ, HA/DEC.
A sync example for an Eq mount. Point to south meridian with DEC axis perpendicular to polar axis. This position corresponds to HA=0/DEC=0. Open the Mount Control Box (the virtual hand controller of Kstars), select HA/DEC of type radio button, set coordinates values (0,0), click sync button. The first alignment point is stored into the DB of the Alignment subsystem. From this moment the goto commands should no longer produce crazy movements.

2. Plate solver sync
Use plate solving to add all required sync points, manually or automatically guided by Kstars.

3. Finally, since plate solving is probably much more accurate than manual pointing of the first power on sync, it is better to delete the first sync point. Go to Alignment tab of driver indi control panel, set point index to 0, select action delete, click exec.

A lot of forgotten things missing ...

Hi Fabrizio, I read with interest item #2 above (Plate solver sync). I have a CGX-L, and use the standard Celestron Indi driver. Some time ago, I was asking if platesolved sync's were sent to the mount to help build up a pointing model. If I remember right, I was told that the driver couldn't do this (no way to provide the offsets/updates to the mount). What do you mean by "add all required sync points"? Is this just for Kstars/Ekos use, or is it for the mount's internal pointing model (typically provided by N star alignment via HC)?

Do I need to build libindi Ekos from source? Or is there a different approach to add the two files above?

It is just for Kstars/Ekos use. Celestron AUX driver controls scope motors directly, bypassing/ignoring mount HC. All the alignment subsystem software lives exclusively in the celestron AUX driver, without any interaction with mount HC.
"All required sync points" means the number you wish, typically at least 2, in theory the more the better, also better if not too far from the sky region where you are observing. Kstars has a nice tool, the "Mount Model" for generating automatically sync points.

You need to build it from source, just copy the new files into .../indi-3party/indi-celestronaux .