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

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

Multiple telescopes connected

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Is it possible to connect more than one mount, telescope, camera etc to Ekos?
If so can they all be operated simultaniously?
5 years 4 months ago #31788

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Yes. Maybe not controlled completely from Ekos, but from INDI control panel.
5 years 4 months ago #31798

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Did you try two instances of kstars running simultaneously? Just a thought?
5 years 4 months ago #31805

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As a first step I was able to command two telescopes to move in Az/El from one instance of KStars.
3 years 2 months ago #66455

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Hi!

I'm very interested in how you might make this work. What precisely is your setup and situation? What would you want to do?

Mine is a dual setup, 2 telescopes + 2 focusers + 2 cameras + 2 filter wheels + 1 guidescope and guidecamera on one mount. So far I can not run them fully simultaneously.

Magnus
3 years 2 months ago #66469

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My goal is just to run two scopes for visual work. I have two Celestron mounts connected via USB to the hand controllers. The weather is stinko at the moment; when it clears I'll align the two scopes and see if I actually get two telescope icons on the star chart.

Are you going directly from your computer USB ports to your equipment or are you using a USB hub? Or is it some other connection?

Bob
3 years 2 months ago #66478

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Hi!

I have two scopes on one mount (Losmandy G11), two cameras, and two identical focusers. To differentiate the focusers, I have settled to connecting them to two R-Pis. My R-Pis run Stellarmate. I use this for imaging (pretty pictures, well, aiming towards pretty...; and variable stars)

So: R-Pi1 connects through USB to mount, camera 1, focuser 1, filterwheel 1, filterwheel 2 (when used, that is when not using a color camera), guide cam.
R-Pi2 connects to focuser 2.

Ekos on R-Pi1 links to focuser 2 (connected to R-Pi2) as a remote device, and with an alias set up on R-Pi2. Everything thus connected to one instance of Ekos, running on R-Pi1.

I then connect through VNC from my desktop indoors.

With this, I can manually switch between cameras. I can not use the Scheduler to switch between them (cannot set up one camera + correct FW + correct focuser as one "kit" that the schdulser switches between).

I hope this makes sense. Looking forward to hear about your progress.

Magnus
3 years 2 months ago #66485

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I was able to control two scopes with one instance of KStars. I'm using the INDI interface directly, not going through Ekos. Compared to most of you, this is a very rudimentary setup. We have a roll-off with two scopes (142 mm refractor and a 356 mm SCT) that we want to use for visual observing.

Once I "aligned" the two scopes (I'm doing this in broad daylight) and connected each scope using the INDI panel, the two icons appeared on the KStars map. If I right-clicked a position on the map, the drop-down menu gave me the choice of slewing either scope to that position. Seem to work fine.

In each case, the computer is connected to the scope hand-controller via a USB interface.
3 years 2 months ago #66581

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Following! I'm trying to use two scopes in parallell to. The old one (IEXOS-100) with Stellarmate on RPi no1 and just a Sony a7 with 75-260mm lens. The new one (Ioptron GEM45) with Stellarmate on RPi no2 and sony a5000 mod with TS65 Quad.
As a first simple solution (on my Ubuntu experimental laptop) I use two separate installations of Kstars. (Just installed the latest and found my old version still present, and using it for the simplest rig.)
This seems to be a workable but somewhat simple solution. Could just as well run two VNC sessions directly at each RPi.
What I really want is one Kstar running but with two instances of Ekos-INDI where you may choose which one to point with and operate. With two Ekos you may run the scheduled jobs with each scope concurrently and fully asynchronously.

My original idea was to just piggyback camera two on the main scope. As I have found out by studying the forum, it is no way to shoot two cameras in parallell in one Ekos (yet?). Thats why I just bought another RPi and recommissioned my old rig.

Please enlighten me how to best achieve what I want!
3 years 1 month ago #67475

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That seems to work. Have just installed and configured for that, but not tested so far. I just installed latest and greatest Kstars, and found my previous still present and operational. I have set this up for my simple secondary rig. Must admit, still need to do a real life test, but foresee no problems. One must of course rename access point name and stellarmare.local to something else for the extra RPi installation so they can be distinguished on the net.

If someone could give me a hint for how to start two separate instances of same version from the desktop, that would be fine!
3 years 1 month ago #67476

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glundby -- you said there isn't a way to control two cameras with one instance of Ekos. Have you tried using the Auxiliary items when defining your gear? It seems you can stick whatever you want into one (or more) of those items.

Whether you can schedule them separately is a whole different question.
3 years 1 month ago #67478

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Hi!

I've tried that - using the aux items. And sure, you can connect more than one camera that way. But you only have one capture module - that means, you can only operate one camera at the time.

And the scheduler can not switch between cameras (or profiles, if you use them - profiles are so to speak stored outside of the sequence in the file). If you have a work-around, I'd be most interested. Right now, I use 2 instances of Ekos to accomplish this (each controlling one camera). And for various reasons, on 2 different Raspberries.

Magnus
3 years 1 month ago #67482

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