"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!

I've checked the command works well, even without the iHubo controller. But I would recommended connecting the hand controller - when a star is aligned, there'll be a beep sound from the iHubo and you can see the number of stars aligned from the HC display. At first I thought the HC is kind of bulky, but later I've found it's handy on certain commands. Like I want to HOME the mount I just press and hold ILL.

Willem, I gave the mount model tool a detailed look. I was observing a single (non repeatable) crash of Ekos/KStars as well when using RST-135. Interestingly though is that a crash can be repeatably forced by either hitting "pause" during the automatic alignment routine or hitting "stop" no matter when. I tried it with simulator drivers only (no real hardware connected) and the same behaviour was observed. Can you please test this as well? It should occur by just opening the mount model tool and then hitting the stop button on the very bottom-right corner.
Ekos Debugger shows this when it happens:
I noticed a function "abort()" getting called in KStar's mountmodel.cpp "MountModel::resetAlignmentProcedure()" as well as in "MountModel::startStopAlignmentProcedure()" when hitting "pause". Maybe abort() is a little too harsh?
@Jasem: Any ideas on that? I think there's a bug in the mount modeling tool.
 

Christopher, yes, the same thing happens here. Just pressing the stop button in the mount model tool crashes KStars. Makes no difference if I have the RST-135E selected, or using the mount simulator.
Same happens on Ubuntu as well on Mac. Both running Kstars 3.5.7 Beta.

Just noted another strange thing. Under the Connection tab, there are no options to configure which serial port to use. It connects well, perhaps because the required info is still in the configuration file?
Is this something that could have changed due to the update? Is there something I may have missed?

 

This does not look like that on my system – all normal here. Steven, can you check please?

  
Mine looks like this.... appears to be normal.

Willem can you try at the Options Tab, and Purge Configuration once, and restart INDI and see if the port comes back?
 

Thank you, Stephen (I'm sorry for misspelling your name).
Can you please tell me as well if the serial number on your General Info tab get's spilled into the firmware field? This happened on Willem's screenshot and I cannot reproduce this behaviour here. I was able to get back the serial number and at my installation it behaves as it should (6 letters in firmware field and 6 letters in serial number field).

Christopher, it's ok, no worries
and mine firmware/serial looks like this.

 

I will have to find out why the firmware version is not appearing. 

This is even weirder.   Maybe I should remove the version fields completely? Seems like this does not work reliably.
Maybe firmware version has another format on RST-135E. On establishing the connection to the mount in Ekos the firmware version get's written into the info log below those fields. Can you please scroll a little and tell me what it says there? For me it's at the very bottom: