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

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

New Internal Solver for Mac, Windows, and Linux -- Testing/ Experiments needed

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Could be the repository version of stellarsolver is out of date. I see Rob made a lot of commits in the last 24h so that might be it. I ran into the same problem earlier in the week. It's easy enough to install it. Clone this:

github.com/rlancaste/stellarsolver

Then run linux-scripts/installStellarSolverLibrary.sh. Try building kstars again.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jose Corazon
3 years 5 months ago #61813

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I got thrown off, because there is no installLinux.sh file.
Running the reinstall now and have already gotten past the point where the installation aborted previously, so I expect it to complete.
Thanks for the tip!
Jo
3 years 5 months ago #61817

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Obviously, there is a new kid on the block:


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3 years 5 months ago #61819
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Rob, at the moment I have no time to test the 4-ParallelSmallScale profile thoroughly. But I had several crashes of kstars testing the downsample option.
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Last edit: 3 years 5 months ago by Heiko.
3 years 5 months ago #61821

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So yes, I just added an auto downsample option today. Please let me know if it downsamples enough.

Right now, for choosing how much to downsample I divide the greatest pixel dimension by 1024 and add 1. So if it is less than 1024 pixels, it does downsample 1, if it is 1500, it does downsample 2, etc. I am thinking that I might want to make that adding 2 not 1, but if it works ok with adding 1, then its better to solve with that. Downsampling makes solves faster, but at the cost of a little accuracy.
3 years 5 months ago #61822

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I just improved the memory check to try to get the available FREE RAM instead of the TOTAL RAM and use that for the calculation of whether it can load all index files. So hopefully if you are on a PI now, whether you select the "load all indexes in memory" option or not, it should not do it if you don't have the RAM. Hopefully this helps.
3 years 5 months ago #61826

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It seems that auto focus is now broken also,

I was trying to autofocus my SCT with a moonlight and was getting very poor star recognition. I then noticed that auto-focus now has an editor that brings up the stellasolver options. I reverted to a pre-stellasolver build, and autofocus with sep is working perfectly.

I hate to say this, but if I have to manage the myriad of stellarsolver options to get autofocus working then I'm off back to windows and ASCOM (sadly - i really like my Rpi4 as a capture device).

I appreciate that this is still early days, but I think that this change needs a lot more thought and work. This is on top of having a lot of issues getting solving to work with it as well.

My overall comment is that something that just worked for the most part has become way too complex and requires way too much tuning, with way too many options. Options are nice, but when something that for the most part just worked gets replaced by this, and it is this fragile, it's a real turn-off.

IMHO this should have stayed on a branch instead of being in the nightlies, or the rollout should have been much slower and more measured.

J.
3 years 5 months ago #61827

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I agree with you and I apologize for that. It was not my goal to implement this so quickly. I wanted a longer test period. I am trying my best to finish everything quickly. Once we get everything ironed out, which I hope is just a few more days, it should be very easy to use. Most of the options should be all wrapped up in the options profiles and you shouldn't even have to change any of them unless you have a special system. My goal is that you can just select a profile that works for you and run with it.
3 years 5 months ago #61828

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In terms of the number of options as well. I don't really know what options to include because there are a lot of options for SEP. I found that just a few tweaks to the options, really really improved things. So when I started working on this back in February/March, I kept begging people to help me figure out which options were best, which options to include, which options to leave out, and help in tuning a set of good options. While I got tons and tons of great help with testing and suggestions, we really needed more help ironing out the options. So in the end, I just left almost all of them in the editor, until people can tell me more about which options are helpful and which ones are not, I really don't think I should remove any until we get more feedback on them. But I'm hoping you are not overwhelmed by them. Hopefully as I said in my last post, most people won't even need to touch them.
3 years 5 months ago #61829

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Are these the new options you are talking about? Works perfectly for me, with a short refractor, at least.

3 years 5 months ago #61830
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The problem you are going to run into in asking about options is that you are only going to get valid feedback from a very small group of users who understand all the options. I certainly don't understand them. And that's a really, really difficult issue to solve. For reference, I manage a team of over 100 engineers doing software and systems engineering, and I am faced with the exact same issue every day. How do I take a complex problem and make it usable and understandable for my users who are not aware of the underlying complexity. So I feel your pain.

The key will be getting a set of defaults that works for the majority of the users. That was case prior to stellarsolver, and a month or two down the road we will hopefully be back there.

I do think the missing piece here is guidance. This is a big change, and there is nowhere to go that I am aware of to even begin to understand how to tweak things to improve matters, and from that provide feedback. What is All Stars? What is Parallel Small Scale & Parallel Large Scale? I don't expect you to answer that here BTW, it's somewhat rhetorical.

If there was a wiki that described the changes and describe the impact of the changes along with some guidance on how to debug and experiment, I think you may have gotten better feedback.

Overall, this is a good change, and I see the validity of it from an architectural perspective. I will continue to play with the nightlies (although the weather does not look like it will cooperate much over the next week or so)

J.
3 years 5 months ago #61831

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Yes, and they are not working for me on my SCT. The classic SCT donuts were throwing it way off, and even close to focus I was not picking up many stars. Reverted to an earlier build and all is now well and getting data around 0.7"/px. with guiding RMS at 0.79". SEP Multistar autoguiding is fantastic.

One of the other profiles may have worked better, but this change was unexpected and there seems to be little background reading to help figure out what to do. Before using a nightly I usually do some testing with the simulators and sometimes my actual mount along with the camera simulator. The two things you can't really test this way are autofocusing and guiding because there are so many optical and mechanical dependencies.

J.
3 years 5 months ago #61832

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