When last Calamity Steve disturbed this esteemed community's serenity (
for those interested in gory details, see here
), I was stuck with a seemingly unfocusable telescope, either with eyepieces or a computer (Astroarch/KStars). Last weekend, I schlepped the rig 300 miles to visit a friend who had more experience than I. We quickly got the thing in focus with eyepieces, then connected the Raspberry Pi and quickly obtained focus in KStars. Hooray, I was now back to where I was four months ago. Taking images. Playing with settings. Doing SOMETHING with my rig.
Well, not quite. Getting the Pi set up there revealed a flaky WiFi connection. We attributed this to poor Wifi signal. from the router. My buddy was prepared for this eventuality, having brought a long Ethernet cable to his AirBnb. With that connected, we were able to get KStars running on my Pi, taking images, etc., feeling good again.
Now I'm back home, trying to get KStars 1.8 loaded.
<strong>Alas and alack, I find I cannot even connect to my Pi!</strong>
Not by Wifi.
Not by Ethernet.
The Pi is running. I can ping it when connected via Ethernet cable to my router..
<code>$ ping astroarch.local
PING astroarch.local (192.168.86.252) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from astroarch.lan (192.168.86.252): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3.95 ms
...</code>
But I can't get to it with noVNC. Connection is refused. Why, when it worked just last weekend?
Removing the Ethernet cable, I find I cannot even ping the Pi.
<code>$ ping astroarch.local
ping: astroarch.local: Name or service not known
</code>
The AstroArch WiFi hotspot does not show up either with Ethernet or WiFi connection.
So, I'm thinking something is wrong with my Pi's networking capability. What might that be? What diagnostics are available on the command line? With an Ethernet connection I can even ssh onto the Pi. But I don't know what to do once I have made that connection.
Or should I just buy myself a new Pi? Maybe a Pi 5? Are there any reviews of Astroarch on a Pi 5 vs. 4?