Last night I was imaging and I am not exactly sure what happened. It seems like Kstar/Ekos shut down but was still tracking and never activated the meridian. This morning I woke up to my scope clashing with my tripod legs. First time this has happened to me and have been very very pleased so far with meridian flip and tracking!

I had tried once to use the mount limits, however, when I did that my meridian flip never activated and so I removed the limits.

My question is, how can I make the mount limits work with the meridian flip? I have the meridian flip once it is .02 hours past the meridian.

I also am not really sure how to understand the mounts limits. if someone could explain it to me that would be great. It seems like a simple concept, but for some reason I am not understanding it.

Thanks!

0.02 hours past meridian is too short. Your mount probably did not report pier side correctly, so when the flip was triggered Ekos thought the mount was already on the correct side and just kept going.

Increase to 2 degrees past meridian, or, if you prefer hours, at least 0.1 hours, better 0.15 hours.

Also, what mount do you have? Can you set an automatic flip behavior in your mount once it is a certain number of degrees past the meridian? Then it will flip, no matter what Ekos thinks.

Okay, I will try increasing the value to .15 hours, I have an HEQ5 so I will see if its possible to set it into the scope, but I dont think it is.

can I use the mount limits if I am using meridian flip?

The HEQ 5 Pro tolerates a high value.
I set mine to: Flip if HA > 5 degree (approximately 0.33 hours)

I think I found the issue, however, I do not know how to solve it.

I am using the scheduler to do all of my imaging now.

Earlier this morning(or yesterday morning) when I opened up VNC viewer I noticed Kstars/Ekos was not open/running. That's when I went to check on my scope and discovered it crashed into the tripod.

Well tonight I decided to stay up with my imaging system just to check things over. I have it up in VNC and I look over, as I look over I notice Kstars/Ekos just shut down. The application itself, not Stellarmate OS. The RPi4 was still on and running.

I opened Kstars/Ekos back up and it detected Indi and asked if I wanted to shut it down.

I wasn't touching anything at the time, just watching it to check up on things. Seems like that's what happened last night and it just kept tracking while Kstars/ekos was shut down, causing the imaging train to hit the tripod.

I want to post logs but I am having issues with that as well. There are no logs being reported despite having my settings all set correctly and activating logs on the indi tabs.

Not a big deal as I am sure we will get to the bottom of this. I wonder if it has to do with the PPBA I am using.

As far as I'm concerned, this is actually a big deal. You cannot rely now on your system unattended. I presumed you're running the stable version of KStars? We have fixed many issues in 3.5.0 coming on soon including some stability issues. Nevertheless, I wouldn't leave this unattended WITHOUT a watchdog driver. I actually use the watchdog driver in my home observatory for exactly the same purpose.. i.e. to safe guard against unexpected shutdown of the client (KStars).

So just add this driver to your equipment profile check that it parks your mount in cases of failure.

Thanks Knro! Yes, I am using the stable release. I had no idea there was a driver like that. I have it set up now. I won't be able to test, I will be away, however I am sure it will work. Thanks for the concern and reply. When I test it out I will report back. I will also make sure I update as well as soon as it is released.

Jasem, will this work if Kstars, running autonomously on the Pi4 on the mount and controlled by VNC, crashes? As I understand, Watchdog is part of the Indi control panel, so when Kstars crashes, doesn't it take Watchdog with it?

Watchdog is really designed for remote connections.
What you could do for example on your "Kstars, running autonomously on the Pi4 on the mount and controlled by VNC" is have indiweb server installed and set kstars to connect to it instead.

with the IP to connect to being the IP of the Pi4.

This means that if Kstars was to shutdown/crash, the connection between the client and the server (still being on the same machine) will cease to exists and the watchdog will park the mount and close the roof.

When KStars crashes, it doesn't take down INDI with it, so the drivers keep running. If the watchdog is alive, it would detect that it got disconnected from the client (Ekos) and would commend the shutdown sequence after the timeout.

Thanks, I need to experiment with that a bit. Last night as I had loaded Watchdog trying to monitor Ekos running on the same machine some interesting things happened. Multiple instances of Indi loaded and Kstars was continuing to solve and align in the absence of any camera or mount or guide tabs in the Kstars window.

Clearly I must have messed up the settings somewhere. I removed Watchdog again and then things went back to normal.

Knro,

Watchdog driver worked. I noticed that ksatrs/ekos crashed so I went outside and the mount was in the process of parking. This makes me feel MUCH better. Thank you for implementing this and thank you for letting me know about it! Worked perfectly!

- Dan