Forgot to post an update.

The camera worked perfectly with the RPi4. Which wasn't surprising, the date was an even number (12.02). Need more testing. Was busy this week, and the forecast for the next week is cloudy.

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> Normal PC
Trying it now and it seems to work. Took 10 60-sec exposures in a row without a problem.

But, the normal PC (Linux laptop) cannot slew the mount. When I used Rpi4, I always connected it with an ethernet cable directly to the mount, and they had their own tiny private local network.
Don't have this setup on my Laptop, and was surprised to find out that the laptop can get position from the mount, but can't control the mount.
Which is why now for the test I'm having both the laptop and the Rpi controlling different parts of the telescope

I also am trying a different USB3.0 Type A cable. Maybe that's also helping? Maybe it's all random and tomorrow it will stop working again? :shrug:

Would be great to figure out how to either replicate that local network setup the Rpi has, or to learn to control the mount via a wireless connection.

Next step: connect the camera to the Rpi4. Wish me luck. Doing it now

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Guess what.

It stopped working, again.
This time I got 3 frames out of a camera before it got stuck.
Tried multiple power cables, tried changing multiple options, tried disabling the cooler, tried increasing binning.
It just stops managing to download an image after several shots.

I'm lost. The only actionable suggestion is to try a better RPi4.
Actually, I have a more powerful single-board-computer lying around: odroid n2, but it also has only 4GB RAM.
I wasn't using it because I couldn't install MountWizzard4. Will give it a try.

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The last night went without troubles.
Now I remember that the first successful night was a few degrees colder than the subsequent failure night. Maybe indeed the camera cooler was working too hard to reach and maintain -20°.
This night I powered the camera directly from a 10A power source, and reduced the target temperature to -15°. No issues at all.
I'm happy.

Don't know if it's related to SDK, probably not. But I did upgrade the libraries

> 8GB version
I've always wanted it. I remember I got the 4GB version only because 8GB version was out of stock.
Checked all the shops, ... and it's still out of stock. I'll keep looking.
Thank you for the suggestion.

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I tried to reproduce that success last night, and it was a disaster.

I set camera to the lowest bandwidth value, which is 40.
Take hundreds of short exposure shots to polar align the mount and for focusing.

But when I do the imaging, the camera stops working after downloading 2 images, 120-sec, binning 1x1, temperature -20. It won't download any more images after that.
Once I was able to do focusing in this stuck state.
Once enabling auto bandwidth unblocked the camera and it kept going to 7 images, when I realized I don't need those images, and stopped. The new imaging sequence couldn't start.

Unblocking the camera is done only by powering it off and on again.

I tried the High Speed Mode - same result
Enabling auto bandwidth helped once, but I guess that was just random.

I can't enable debug information for the driver, somehow it gets immediately disabled :shrug:

The camera is powered by a power adapter 12V 2.5A.

Restarting the camera driver in Ekos leads to KStars crashing in 10-60 seconds.

Please help.

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Yep, had a good run shooting the comet yesterday. No issues with the camera. The lowest bandwidth setting is now the default in Ekos. No idea how exactly a value becomes the default value, but it has happened

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It's a 4GB RPi.

> disable FITS viewer
done

> lower USB bandwidth
you're genius!!!
What I did:
Camera starts, try taking 5 images of 1-sec-exposure. The camera manages 2 shots and then keeps failing.
Restart.
Change Bandwidth from 80 to 40. Repeat. Everything works. 5 shots of 1 sec, 5 shots of 4 sec, shots with binning.
Download times are higher. 7sec instead of 5.5 sec, but whatever.

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My camera ZWO ASI6200MM works, but I can't make any use of it.

Typical session:
* power up all the equipment
* start KStars
* Take a preview image with 1 sec exposure -- works
* Try taking another image with 4 seconds of exposure -- reports "Exposure Failed", retries a few times and gives up
* No more images after that can be taken.
* Restarting the camera driver sometimes lets me take another 1 sec exposure image.
* get upset for 10 months.

I'm running kstars on a raspberry pi 4 on ubuntu 22.04. Indilib was installed as `sudo apt-get install indi-full gsc`.

Happy to do any experiments and collect any kinds of logs.
Haven't tried any other imaging software.

Please help

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Thanks for the advice.

> with the medium star size option
Wow, I haven't even realized I can choose the star sizes.

Will try to adjust auto-focus settings as you, @nou and @Jerry Black, suggested. It seems that my step size is still much too large.

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Hello,

I've been using KStars with Pegasus FocusCube v2 for 2 nights and I'm fighting KStars a lot.
If I use the scheduler, it forces the option "Auto Select Star" in the "Focuser" tab. Which leads to all the focusing not being able to converge.
The focuser module, moves the focus outward by a few thousands of steps and takes a picture. All stars are obviously blurred. The focuser module then decides that that galaxy or that nebula is the best star in the image. It adjusts the focus, and every other star comes into focus, but the galaxy/nebula remains blurry. The focuser module reports a failure.
Sometimes the initial outward focus is so large that the stars turn into very large circles. The focuser module finds a tiny bit of random noise and decides that this is the best star in the image. The big circles eventually turn into point-like stars, but the focuser module isn't interested, it keeps looking at that tiny bit of random noise in the image. For this specific problem reducing the initial step by 10x helped. However, if this initial step happens to be too small, the focuser module will not ever go further outward than the initial step.

Without the focuser device, I had moderate success in using the scheduler to image DSO unattanded. Now I got the auto-focuser device, and unattended imaging no longer seems feasible, as it requires constant babysitting.
Please tell me what am I doing wrong. How can I make an effective use of the auto-focuser to let the imaging run unattended?

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