Yes I noticed that the time is wrong. But I did not fix it on system level, I just changed the time in Kstars. Might that be the problem? Is Ekos using system time instead of Kstars time?

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What is the difference between aligning the camera to Polaris at the beginning, or syncing the camera position later using plate solving? That is the point I am not understanding.
After I sync, Kstars displays where it thinks the camera is pointing at and that is correct.

Does GoTo only work if the camera lens has an axis parallel to the polar axis?

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Hi there,
I am a complete beginner in astrophotography and I have been reading a lot about the topic.
I have now a setup consisting of an iExos 100 mount, a modded canon 60d with a 300mm lens mounted on a ball head on the mount, and a raspberry pi 4 running astroberry to control the whole thing.



Everything is connecting fine. I can start Ekos, connect to the mount and DSLR, and take some snapshots.

For now, I completely skip the polar alignment and I roughly position my mount towards Polaris. It is probably not well aligned, the axis where the hole for polar alignment is points roughly to Polaris.

I then loosen the ball head and point my camera roughly to a region in the sky that interests me, let's say andromeda.

Trying to plate solve and sync when Ktars thinks the camera is looking at Polaris ends up timing out (I downloaded all recommended and necessary fits). So I help it a bit by first syncing manually to Andromeda.
I previously pointed the camera roughly towards Andromeda so plate solving is successful and it syncs to the real region where the cam is looking.

Now is when the problems start. When I want to send the mount to a different object in the sky, it seems to go in a completely wrong direction, sometimes even the opposite. The error is so large it can't be explained by a not very precise polar alignment alone.

Did I miss a crucial step when setting up the mount? Does the Parking/Unparking play a role in this (is parking like homing the motors of the mount?)
Or is it because of the ball head that can give the camera a random direction relative to the mount?

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The iEXOS support forum was really helpful and I got it working!
In order to make the mount controllable through USB/Serial, some commands need to be run in order to switch the internal state of the mount.
The process is described in detail in this file Switching Between the WiFi Interface and the Serial Interfaceon the iEXOS 100â„¢Mount Controller

Hopefully that helps others with the same problem.

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I tried from another Linux laptop, all USB ports, USB 2 and USB 3 but same error, timeouts. Do you think I should ask on the Explore Scientific forums? Or how would I further debug this?

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Thanks for the fast reply.
I have the new one with the mini USB socket connected directly to my PC. After connecting i can see it being recognized in the linux logs as FTDI device.
I did it the way you proposed from Ekos but I still get timeouts.

I will try it from another pc to single out usb problems.

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Hi everybody,
I am new to this field and decided to start with an iEXOS 100 and a small apo refractor.
I got my mount to move using the provided app and wifi so it is working fine.

I added the ppa repos and installed indi-full and kstars-bleeding

What I did was starting Kstars, going to Tools->Devices->Devices Manager
On the Local/Server tab I chose ES IEXOS PMC8, Local mode and click on Run Server.
i checked the config and all seemed fine (baudrate, usb port etc)

Then I click on connect and I get the timeout errors.

When I connected the mount to my laptop via USB, I could see that it is recognized as an FTDI device "FT232R USB UART" on ttyUSB0.
I made sure my user is part of the dialout group which handles this kind of devices (to be safe I also started Kstars as root but it didn't help).

Am I doing something wrong? Or how could I best gather debug logs for that? The only logs I see now are:

org.kde.kstars.indi: ES iEXOS100 PMC-Eight :  "[ERROR] check_pmc8_connection(): Error connecting. Please read the instructions at: http://indilib.org/devices/telescopes/explore-scientific-g11-pmc-eight/ before using this driver!For serial connections, a special USB SERIAL cable setup is REQUIRED. "
org.kde.kstars.indi: ES iEXOS100 PMC-Eight :  "[ERROR] Read error: Timeout error 

Thanks

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