Ad Astra Observatory

A friend (thanks M_!) and I finally evicted the wasps that had been living under the dome for a couple of years. We also scrubbed the exterior of the dome, and it looks nice again (hey, every 5 years it gets a scrub).

So I took up the mantle of “figuring out where I’d left off” the last time I’d been out in the shed.

The entire rig is wired as if INDI/Ekos is the name of the game. The Windows laptop and Mac desktop downstairs are powered down, and even the little Windows “stick” that was running the dome, has now been removed and moved into the house.

So I was a little concerned when the final blog entry had all photos from Sequence Generator Pro (ie from the Windows rig), and was grousing about how RasPi just isn’t ready yet.

I checked all the wiring, tried to grok what I was doing, and then booted up the rig from the RasPi. Getting VNC to work took a little doing — I ended up switching the RasPi to TightVNC server.

Ekos hooked right up so easily that I thought I’d done something wrong. 😀 Within minutes of getting VNC connected, I was driving the filter wheel (one of the newest pieces of equipment) back and forth, and had connections to the Pi through the ASI294 camera’s USB ports in addition to those onboard the Pi.

I eventually decided to try to hook the dome (despite lacking a driver) to the RasPi rig. This involved some interesting machinations, as I needed to re-route the autoguider camera through the main camera, because I’d run out of USB ports.

When I brought the rig back up after connecting the dome and re-routing the autoguider… one of the RS232-to-USB adapters decided not to come back up (I have 2, one for the mount and one for the motor focuser — the focuser one decided to take a dive _shrug_).

I decided this was enough fun for the day, and so I am leaving the shed with the following status:
* Ekos can connect to “almost” everything (need to reset the /dev/ttyUSB* connections somehow)
* PHD did connect to autoguider and mount
* I have no idea how to actually do an imaging run with INDI, but that’s next
* and I’m ready to actually drive the dome from the Pi (needs driver).