The jumping HA was in the coordinates in the Ekos mount panel. The hand controller was fine and listed correct local time and UTC offset.

Willem,
After some tries about the Esc -> blank display behavior: I've found that I can just keep pressing the Esc a few times until the startup display shows again. Then i-Hubo will become responsive again to the buttons.
So just a few sec lag, not too much of a problem.
Stephen
 

@Christopher wrote: "Question: Are there some other features missing which are implemented into the ASCOM driver?"

I'm not familiar with the ASCOM driver other than the star alignment option. If this is about 'nice to haves', it would be handy if we could turn the 'save alignment info' on/off in Ekos. Currently that has to be done in the HC. Since the mount is mostly used in a mobile setting, the setting would be 'off' most of the time, but now that we will be using more alignment data, it would probably be good practise to turn it on for the evening, so that if for whatever reason the mount needs to be powered on/off, not all alignment data is lost. It's just a few clicks in the HC to turn this on/off, so no big deal, but if it can be done in ekos, it would be convenience. Looking at the protocol list though, I did not see anything that would control this option...

Hi everyone,
I've received a reply from BJ confirming the blank display issue. He mentioned to get the display to work again, just press Esc one more time to resolve.
Stephen

Star Alignment functionality got merged into master today and should be available as nightly soon.
Additionally I implemented the following:

• included setting of slew speeds in Motion control tab
• included mount's firmware version and serial number in new General Info tab
• included optional pulling of mount's voltage and temperatures in General Info tab

Please test the above on RST-135E since I was able to test only on the non encoder version.

Thanks!

Thank you Christopher. As soon as the nightly build is available, I will try.

Just had a chance to load the nightly build and test out the new functionality using the RST-135E. In short: perfect!
 
- Enabling Star Alignment in the new Alignment tab does exactly what is expected. Each Sync command from Ekos is not registered in the mount as a 'star match'. With 5 star matches, all 6 modeling parameters are presented (see picture).

  


- Pressing ESC to get out of this menu does give the blank screen as reported by others. Pressing it a few more times will get you back to the main screen
- When disabling the Star Alignment option, new sync commands do not add to the star matches.
- The automatic mount model (Ekos makes a grid of e.g. 6 points and runs them sequentially) did not work. Often after one or two stars, the remaining points would auto populate, and ekos would then hang and ultimately crash. This may very well have to do with the fact that testing was done with the CCD simulator. Remains to be checked 'under the stars'
- Building a model by running manually 5 or 6 goto-sync cycli is a matter of maybe 2-3 minutes, so very fast.
- The new options under motion control to set slew speeds, guiding speed, etc work well too. These are not values that are changed often, but it is nice to have them available when needed.
- A new (?) tab General info shows firmware/serial number as well as voltage and temperature of the mount. By default this is disabled. Is there any harm in enabling it? Perhaps enabled would be a good default.

   

All in all this looks very good. Thank you so much Stephen and Christopher for pulling this together!

Best regards, Willem Jan.


 

Thanks for testing, Willem.

Regarding "automatic mount model": Am I assuming correctly you're using the "Mount Model Tool" which can be started in EKOS Align Tab by the button "Mount Model"? I tried this with CCD simulator as well and I did not observe any issues. But I will test it again tomorrow. Did EKOS crash or the hand controller?

Regarding Firmware Version: There's obviously a small bug in the data field. It seems to append the serial number of the mount which is not intended. This did not happen during my tests but to be honest, I somehow deleted my mount's serial number. I will try to fix this issue – but most likely will be difficult since I'm not able to test it live.

Regarding pulling of V&T: I made this optional and turned off by default because I was not sure whether everyone is interested in this information and if active in sum three serial commands are being continuously sent (limited by set pull rate) additional to the mount's more important data like RA/DEC & ALT/AZ positions. Unfortunately I did not figure out how to store the setting in the driver's config file yet – this would be the most convenient solution.

Indeed, it is the “mount model tool” I am referring to. It almost seemed like a timing issue, that’s why I thought it might be the CCD simulator. If you have no issues with it, perhaps it is some setting I had not correct in the current test setup. Will try again when there’s some clear skies.

Ah, yes, I see, in log files you would flood important pointing info with unimportant V&T info. We can easily leave it as it is. If you want to know the info, it immediately populates as soon as you enable the pull V&T.

Thanks again for all your work.

"If you want to know the info, it immediately populates as soon as you enable the pull V&T." >> Sorry, have to ask one more thing: Enabling the pulling of V&T does immediately populate the serial number in the firmware field? Or immediately populates the log files with the V&T data?

Enabling pull V&T immediately populates the log files with V&T data. Serial number is in there regardless enabling/disabling pull V&T

Great development! Thank you very much!
One question - does this new star alignment feature need the hand controller to be connected or it's all happening in Ekos?
Thanks!