Last updated on February 27th, 2022 at 09:06 pm
No stars being photographed as I have to pay for the clouds that come with new equipment. Clouds roll in with thunderstorms every night around 7pm amazing. So with the down time, I have been able to focus on integrating some new components into the system and cleaning up the user interfaces. One of the biggest issues I have had is using the Remote Desktop instance of Astroberry. While it is nice and easy to use it still is running on a Raspberry Pi4 so it can be a little laggy. Goal: Get the INDI server up and running on the Raspberry Pi Astroberry instance and then run kStars and EKOS on my MacBook directly instead of using remote desktop.
After reading up on some forums I finally found the secret location of the INDI server web instance on the Raspberry Pi Astroberry. It is on the second page after you click the start button when you log into the web server running on the Raspberry Pi. There is a slider bar on the left side of the display. Once I found this it was fairly easy to create a new profile, run down the driver list, and select my hardware. Click start INDI server and bam!
Logged into kStars from my Mac and selected EKOS, set to remote, pointed it to the Astroberry server and everything I had connected to the Raspberry Pi and enabled in the EKOS drivers pages on the Mac showed up connected.
I have received my new camera which is an ATIK 383L+ and it worked great and was easy to get connected in the setup as well. Driver was called out in the drop down already installed and selected it. I am really looking forward to getting this out to take some new pictures. This camera will have significantly less noise to have to deal with during Image Processing.
I have also received the ZWO EAF autofocuser and set that up as well. Everything was easily recognized in EKOS and drivers where already there so it was a simple drop down and we were ready to go. I ordered a mount for the RedCat from Deep Sky Dad so I am waiting on that to arrive.
Another benefit of running kStars and EKOS locally on my Mac with be image captures will come directly to my hard drive saving me a couple of SCP copies from the Raspberry Pi. Every little bit in workflow saves time and makes the boring stuff fade away so we can focus on the cool fun stuff.
New mount is scheduled to be delivered next week and now focusing on cabling since this is my Gen 2 setup and there are quite a few more cables to manage. Spent the afternoon on Amazon and eBay to find the right length cables so hopefully it will clean up the rig and be pretty nice to work with. I think I am going to mount the Astroberry right behind the ATIK camera since most of the cabling to the equipment will run out from there.
New Power Station battery which should power the mount up for mount of the night provide 200Wh of power. I am estimating the power consumption of the rig will be around 30W. The Power Station is a pretty cool little product and worthy of a page all in itself. This thing is small and light weight. It will work perfect for that Dark Sky Park trip coming up.
