Hi,

I just wanted to share my experience using an Xbox 360 controller (with a Windows USB 2.4G receiver) together with a Raspberry Pi 4b and a HEQ-5 with EQMOD.

To make it short: Works like a charm! I can control N/E/S/W movement with one of the controller's joysticks, I can change slew speed, park, unpark and abort motion at the touch of a button. This is especially comfortable when slewing while looking through the finder scope, because if the mount is connected to the Pi, I don't have the mount's hand control any more... And using the mount control in Ekos with a mouse or a touchpad is not very comfortable.

And, on top of this, I can control my Celestron motor focuser (SCT) with the controller buttons, too! Focus in and focus out, with an adjustable (small) step size is great. I can make corrections to the focus from any Ekos window and don't have to go back to the focus window and focus in and out with a mouse click or touchpad.

Yes, there are the automatic functions of Ekos like plate-solve-and-sync and auto focus and they work great, but manual control with joystick and buttons has its niches where it is really helpful. For instance when watching Venus in the dusk sky, no stars to plate-solve and autofocus yet, so you have to manually slew to Venus using the finder and focus manually.

All I had to do is plug in the USB receiver (which is normally used to connect the controller to a Windows PC) in my powered USB hub connected to the Pi, install the Xbox 360 driver via

sudo apt-get install xboxdrv

and start the driver via

sudo xboxdrv --detach-kernel-driver --silent

More information on this driver can be found here . As long as the driver is running in a terminal window, you can select the controller as a joystick from within Ekos (auxiliary device, for me it is port /dev/input/js1) and use it. The range of the wireless connection between the receiver plugged into the Pi and the controller is more than sufficient for me, it's no problem to sit inside and use the controller even if there are 2 walls in between. So I still have the "full wireless setup" sitting in the living room controlling my telescope on the balcony.

CS, Bernd