polarus umi replied to the topic 'ZWO AM5 Harmonic Drive Mount' in the forum. 2 years ago

I've been spending some time with astroberry EKOS and the AM5 and here's my update/observations. Hope more people can add their experiences and tips here.

First of all, yes INDI already shows ZWO>AM5 as a selectable mount. So driver is technically ready to use if you have the latest indi update. The driver seems to be the same one used for Meade lx200 autostar.

That said, there are some quirks that I felt need fixing in future driver updates.

Firstly, the above problem of slew error does not occur if I first do a 1 star align using the ASI mount app. Once I do an align on a random spot in the sky and then do goto on kstars sky map it goes to the object. But it doesnt work fully. Once the slew is technically done, ekos still thinks it is slewing. So even after I can see that the mount is stopped, ekos says it is slewing and most buttons in different modules are disabled. The band aid fix is to open the mount control window and click on STOP after which the mount shows that it is idle. Also, another related issue is that the Park button does not work. It says 'Parking' but mount doesn't move.

Secondly, kstars has an option to update its time and location using the mount. However, the Time is always +1hr extra because the UTC data downloaded from the mount seems to include +1hr probably due to Daylight saving added. This needs to be fixed in kstars because the mount app has no option to adjust daylight saving info. Until then I'll be using GPS dongle which takes a while to get a fix.

Guiding, polar align works well in conjunction with above band aid solutions.

I welcome any qs anyone may have. Will probably create a new thread with logs for troubleshooting above issues.

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