Hello all...
I am new to the forum, but not new to astronomy, (photography and otherwise)
I have read a lot of threads in this forum , as well as viewed a lot of tutorials.
I am absolutely CONVINCED, that this is the first question that I'll have among many others. Here it goes...

I have a Stellarmate complete unit
I have a windows 7 laptop with Kstars loaded on it
the SM unit will reside outside at the mount
I have an ethernet cable running to my house from the mount and a powered USB hub
The above is how I plan to run everything....
Now, the issue...

I wanted to test all was working properly before i make everything permanent , so

I fire up my laptop...it is connected to my home wifi (good, now I have Internet )
I connect all my peripherals to the SM (except the mount) Canon DSLR, Orion Starshoot, ZWO focuser
I connect an ethernet cable to the SM.....I power it up
I connect the other end to my laptop
First I open a browser, and enter, stellarmate.local....nope no connection
Then in the browser I try 10.250.250.1 nope...no connection
Then I connect to the SM webmanager via my Ipad and view the IP address it was issued (169.254.XX.)
I go back to the browser open on the laptop and enter that...nope...no connection
If disconnect my home wifi on the laptop, and connect to SM's wifi address...then I CAN access the webmanger, (and launch Kstars and Ekos)
BUT now I dont have internet access, because I've disconnected my wireless....I want live internet at the same time.
What am I doing wrong?

DJ

Hi DJ,
I have almost the same setup. However, I connected my SM thru ethernet with a (netgear)switch that was connected to my home network. In that way the SM gets an IP address that works within your home network!
In your setup you try to connect two different networks with probably different domains (which won't work).
Another advantage would be that then you can reach your SM thru wifi from any place in the house
Btw I can testify that connecting your laptop with a ethernet cable to a switch as well will give a huge performance advantage especially with downloading images!
Cheers, Arnold