Hi Jasem,

thanks for your reply!

knro wrote: Hello Simon,

That's great to here. Please share some photos of this observatory with us.


I have attached some pics. The observatory is pretty much set up and the rig is waiting in a box to be put up in the obsy. But first I have to make sure, that it is rain tight ;-) The design of the housing is a close adoption of Magnus Eriksens project (Thanks Magnus for the great blog on Stargazers Lounge).

I am a little worried about polar alignment (the lid of the obsy is blocking the view of the north celestial pole -> so I guess I have to use the legacy polar alignment tool), but that is a different story ...

knro wrote: I am doing exactly the same thing in my home observatory, so I'm not using the Pegasus, since I built my observatory back in 2015 and went to Digital Loggers Power Switch to turn on/off the equipment when the observatory is started/closed. To answer you question:

1. Yes, it's possible, you can use indi_setprop to toggle UPB ports on/off. Though that means that A) Pegasus has to be powered at all times, and B) indiserver running UPB must be up and running.


Yes, I was thinking the same. Ekos will run on a Raspberry Pi 4 and hopefully the UPB can cope with being powered on all the time.

knro wrote: mkfifo /tmp/indififo
indiserver -v -f /tmp/indififo

This starts INDI server in FIFO mode.

Then open another console

echo "start indi_pegasus_upb" > /tmp/indififo

This would case the INDI server to start this driver. Next you'd use indi_setprop to toggle the 12v for them on/off. Say, you turned power for the QHY camera, then you'd this:

echo "start indi_qhy_ccd" > /tmp/indififo

Then that would start is on the server and so forth. I hope this helps.


Okay, let me make sure I get this right. I will start Ekos (graphically on the RPi 4). Then I will feed the scheduler with a sequence file, weather data and startup script. When the target is visible and weather is appropriate, the startup script starts indiserver in fifo mode and connects 1) the UPB, 2) turns on the 12V outlets of the UPB to power on the other devices and 3) starts the drivers for the other devices, right?

Above you say something about opening another console. How is that taken care of in a startup script? Just by using a new "os.system(echo "start indi_***_***" > /tmp/indififo)" call in my python script?

Thank you for the help. This is really exciting.

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