Greetings all, I took some notes from last night's session, and wanted to get some feedback in the case I am doing something wrong. All of my packages are -bleeding unless otherwise noted.
I have:
Intel Gen7 i3 NUC with Fedora 25
Sirius EQ-G with EQ-direct cable from Shoestring
GlobalSat BU-353-S4
a couple ASI cameras
a moonlite stepper focuser
1) I mentioned it in another thread, but will mention it here, too. The time offset for DST is off 1 hour, and it throws off the sync and causes plate-solve to take extra steps. Related link:
forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=314257 . At this point, this one might be a lower level problem than INDI, though it seems INDI should look at system time and not rtc, but either should work.
2) Indistarter is a separate project, and works very well. It has one bug where after everything is green and the services are started, my ASI camera line turns red again even though the driver is still running fine. I have not looked into this further to see if it is INDI reporting ASI down back to indistarter, or if the bug is entirely indistarter not handling something.
3) I would like to have the option to not have a failed tracking stop the capture. I don't seem to see where to set that. That is, if for some reason I lose my tracking star, I would like for it to just try to pick up another one and no abort the entire sequence. It is much easier to drop 1 image than to restart the entire sequence if I am not at the computer. This might be a setting I have just missed somewhere, as this area seems pretty solid.
4) Astrometry fails with 16bit FITS files. I need to look into this one further. RGB, Luma, and 8bit FITS all work fine. Online upload also works, it is just too slow for my liking. I can solve locally in a couple seconds when I switch the image type from 16 bit to something else. I tried turning debug on, but have not found anything yet.
5) This is a change in the last week. When I set up a sequence, set the cooler, the exposure time, the number of captures, etc, and then hit the "+" button to add it, it appears to add it fine, but when I hit the play button to start it, it run a previously configured job that I had removed with the "-" button. It doesn't appear that the "-" button is fully removing the information and it only goes to the new capture sequence after the now hidden previous one runs again.
6) A feature request, not a bug: For EAA type stuff, it would be nice to be able to stack captured images in the fits viewer, and to have a couple more option for black levels and such in the histogram for tuning the expansion of captured fits files. That being said, I know EAA is not why and how it was designed, so the other 5 items are certainly higher on my list of things to address.
Overall, the experience is great. The level of integration between the parts is wonderful for a one-stop photo session, and the ability to run everything attached to the scope remotely is amazingly versatile. It is really nice, I'd like to help make it nicer by providing any information and testing I can to assist in tracking down the above items. If any of the above are user (me!) issues, I am ready to be educated.
Thanks to the dev team for the hard work on INDI/Ekos!
Jim