Brian created a new topic ' Trouble with Ekos' in the forum. 6 years ago

Trouble with Ekos:

This past weekend I had a full night to try out an imaging run with KStars/Ekos/Indi on Ubuntu 17.04. While I did get a good number of Images I also had a fair number of issues. I unfortunately only had the logs set to normal instead of verbose, but I'll attach them anyway. The main problems I ran into (in increasing severity) were:

### Polar Alignment

Once I got all the astrometry.net index files installed and the local solver working this actually works fairly fast. Unfortunately, it does not seem very reliable. I could probably create a separate topic just for polar alignment, so I'll just breifly mention that (1) running it multiple times produces different results, and (2) it doesn't seem like it rotates the mount correctly (at least not how I am expecting).

While an inconvinence, this didn't really hinder the imaging session.

### Guide Camera Driver (QHY5)

I have a SSAG guidecam and it uses the QHY5 indi driver. For the most part this works fine, but I am constantly having to disconnect/reconnect it from the indi control panel. Any time an image capture is stopped/canceled (which happens every time a 'looping' mode is stopped), the connection to the camera breaks any any attempt to capture an image after that results in an error until it is reconnected.

While annoying, this also isn't a show-stopper, although I suspect if I was using a headless indi server remotely this might be more trouble.


### Guiding

I haven't been able to get guiding to work in Ekos yet. I don't really understand the settings, so I left them at default and just tried to calibrate, but it always fails. Maybe if there were a tutorial on this type of thing I could get it working, but for now I just open up PHD2 and guide in that (connecting through indi server).

This works fine but it doesn't allow dithering. Last night I tried a quick setup in my backyard so I could test the "external guiding" setting in Ekos and enable dithering. It worked successfully for the first couple of images, then one of the dithers failed with "timeout waiting for settle" and the image captures just continued without dithering. I aborted the run, and disconnected/reconnected to the guider, but after that happened it never dithered again (even though it would say that it WAS dithering).

This is a bigger hangup as my DSLR has a lot of pattern noise that shows up after stacking.

### Crashing

During both the weekend run and last night's run I was unable to complete a full sequence. Most of the times the image capture will just stop and hang, a couple times it showed a popup saying the indi server crashed. Once, KStars itself crashed.


### Misc

The last thing that makes using Ekos difficult is the fact that any changes/settings in the Ekos/Indi control panels don't seem to persist. When I disconnect/reconnect indi (which I have to do quite a bit), all my setup sequences, settings, etc get reset to the defaults. It would be very helpful if these settings just persisted to whatever you set them last.


I use the bleeding edge ppa so I know things change fairly frequently, but I am surprised I am having so much trouble getting a full run to go smoothly. Maybe I have a particularly odd setup or am doing something wrong?

My setup is:

Canon 650D on a Celestron AVX with a SSAG guider.

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