jpaana: I have more or less the same experience.

JFYI: I have created experimental pull request which replaces "Enforce counter-weight up" with "Target Pier Side". The safe limit is still hardcoded to 1 hour across meridian.

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Hi,

Is anybody using the "Enforce counter-weight up" property in eqmod ?
It is supposed to control pier side but it is rather unreliable and hard to use, IMO. The client basically has to guess which pier side the driver would choose and eventually set this property to make the driver use the opposite side. But under certain conditions the driver may ignore this request, see this for details.

I want to change the behavior, but I don't want to break any functionality which is used. This is my idea:

Add new property "Target Pier Side" with values

"Auto" - current behavior, with counterweight down
"West", "East". - enforce given pier side, abort goto if the target is outside of safe range

maybe also rename "Enforce counter-weight up" to "Allow counter-weight up" and use it to extend the safe range 1 hour across meridian. Alternatively this can be given as numeric property.


Any opinions?

References:
https://github.com/indilib/indi/issues/798
https://github.com/indilib/indi/pull/550

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Yes, this would indeed work, but I'd rather push actual orientation to the mount directly, without moving.

I think the correct solution would be this:
- write a driver for the orientation sensor (it might even work with indi-duino driver), best output would be probably alt-az coordinates and maybe also pier side
- patch eqmod to optionally snoop this driver and use these coordinates if everything else fails (Skywatcher::Init() at the end)

Does such patch have any chance to get accepted?

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Hi,
I am using eq6 mount with eqmod driver. My goal is to set up full remote control.
As far as I understand, the driver does not know the absolute orientation, so the starting point is set from parking position and if that fails, it expects mount orientation with counterweight down and telescope pointing to north pole.
The problem is that if the mount is not in this position for some reason, it can lead to dangerous situations.
I want to try to use arduino with orientation sensor (like BNO055) to get the initial orientation. My question is how to push the value from the sensor to eqmod driver. Adding it as a sync point probably won't work because the sensor is not precise enough.
Is there any standard way how to do it?

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