Hi,

I'm upgrading my Avalon M-zero mount to an M-zero OBS which has AZ and ALT motors for automatic polar alignment. As far as I can tell, I'll be controlling those motors using Aux in Ekos but I'm not sure what to choose for that in the drop downs (screenshot attached). Any advice is much appreciated, thanks!

Hi,

I also have an M-Zero OBS mount, with the polar alignment motors, and you can't use any of the indi supported drivers with them to perform PAA alt-az adjustment as they are not motors used in the sense of an alt-az driven mount (or eq driven mount) unfortunately.

I ended up building my own Teensy and TMC2209 based stepper controller with up/down/east/west buttons for those motors to perform the polar alignment adjustments as I did not like using the Avalon StarGo controller to do that through their hand controller, as it is cumbersome. I also ideally wanted to automate the PAA adjustment by taking the alt and az error values from the EKOS PAA routine and feeding them to a python script that would make the appropriate corrections to the mount elevation (latitude) and azimuth. Unfortunately again, from what I understand, those error values are not available outside EKOS, either through indilib or other mechanism. What I ended up doing then is get a 433Mhz remote (Amazon) with 4 relays and I connected the relays in parallel with the buttons of my stepper controller, that now allows me to perform the PAA routine from the comfort of my home, my observatory being a short distance outside.

You may want to look into a similar solution but I will follow this thread as any different idea may be interesting to consider.

Hope this helps,

Gilles

well, there are a few issues here. first of all, you bypassed kstars/ekos alltogether. you could ask for dev help, ekos definitely knows how to control those motors, the motors are already exposed by the controller. did you look into the INDI control panel for the mount, at the AUX ports? i think you can set them as stepper motors and control them from there, but i'm not sure, since i don't have the upgraded mount.
second, i think avalon already has a working solution for the RA/ALT motors in their new StarGo which is based on INDI. I'll talk to them.

another, easier and more elegant solution than an extra controller and remote would be to use VirualHERE. run the server on your INDI pc/rpi and share the mount to a windows computer. on that windows computer you can run the VirtualHERE client and the avalon polar alignment software. once you're done, stop the VirtualHERE client and server and resume normal INDI operations.

PM me for more details if you need any.

maybe the driver needs an update to add the second AUX port in the control panel (currently you can only enable AUX1, there should be an AUX2 port as well - see attached screenshots).
that's how i think you can manually control those motors... but again, an updated driver would be ideal.