Re:An alignment issue in KStars via INDI

Power! Good point! I solved two such issues myself in the past: one was that the dew heaters were on the same 12V as the mount, and the other was that a CPL plug was connected on the local mains loop. Both were causing damaging noise onto the serial port communications...

-Eric

Ok, I see, so I need to:
1. Set more precise time and a scope location
2. Correct the park position of the mount manually to match the default park position in Kstars

I thought that Kstars doesn't have default park point. I mean looks like there is some kind of a stepper position, which translated in Kstars as "position towards NCP".
But I expected that the first sync on NPC would overwrite this point. So I make the park position a stepper position when RA and DE Steps are both set to 10000000, so I can easily reset park position at this point, knowing, that this position is pointing to NCP. Looks like I was wrong.
But I still can't understand, can't I really manually set this default park position? It's just a wrong model of my mount in Kstars/INDI. Is it possible to set that "this" stepper position positioned towards NCP? Is there a model of my mount that by default identify (when no alignment has been made at all) that some stepper position of the mount is pointing to the specific place in the sky?

Not sure that power can create a problem, but I will double check this as well.

I see you have the same mount as I have. If you're interested in the driver-level details of parking/home values in eqmod, I can offer this: github.com/indilib/indi/issues/717 . But there have been quite a few interesting posts recently on the subject in the forum.
On the HEQ5, check whether the red power led is blinking while slewing and tracking. If it is, power is probably on the issue list.

-Eric

I have a HEQ5 Pro as well and I have had strange alignment/slewing problems lately when I start the session. These are usually fixed by returning the mount to park position and then disconnecting all equipment, stop & start INDI/EKOS again. Usually that does the trick by starting it again from "fresh" park position. I usually start the session with Polemaster polar aligment and I use the mount control to rotate mount and then return it to park position. I'm not sure if that is the reason for the strange slewing problem.

When I did a full restore to my Stellarmate I forgot to change the time zone correctly which caused this method to fail and I was not able to slew the mount to anywhere correctly, so that is one thing to check.

MikkoI wrote: I have a HEQ5 Pro as well and I have had strange alignment/slewing problems lately when I start the session. These are usually fixed by returning the mount to park position and then disconnecting all equipment, stop & start INDI/EKOS again. Usually that does the trick by starting it again from "fresh" park position. I usually start the session with Polemaster polar aligment and I use the mount control to rotate mount and then return it to park position. I'm not sure if that is the reason for the strange slewing problem.

When I did a full restore to my Stellarmate I forgot to change the time zone correctly which caused this method to fail and I was not able to slew the mount to anywhere correctly, so that is one thing to check.

Update to this issue - the align and slewing problems were caused by faulty battery so this was a power issue for sure. I had a similar problem a week ago again and I noticed that the HEQ5 led was blinking so I checked the voltage from my battery and it was so low that my other equipment started to fail as well shortly. Now I replaced the battery with a new AGM 60ah car battery and everything works really well. Alignment is very fast now - slew to target, plate solve, one correction slew and the target is right in the center. Very pleased!