Keith replied to the topic 'Moving Stellarmate OS to an NVME SSD' in the forum. 4 months ago

That's easy. . . the NVME drive is drawing ALOT more power than the SD card. I assume that you're powering your Rpi thru the USB-C port on the Rpi? The Rpi-5 is already drawing alot of power and if it dips down below a certain voltage for a millisecond, then "things" can happen. It may not be enough of a brown-out to cause a total reboot of the Rpi, but it may be enough to cause individual chips or sub-systems to reboot.
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Everything can be working along just fine for hours and then something happens where all 4 cores of the Rpi fire up to 100%, and the Ethernet system is working at 100%, and . . . and. . . brownout.
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I went thru the exact same issue when I was setting up my Rpi-5/NVME system. The solution I came up with is to power the Rpi directly thru the 5VDC GPIO pins with a power supply that has alot of ass behind it maintain voltage no matter how many chips fire up.
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I am currently getting ready to test an Rpi Hat that I've integrated a 5VDC@6A power supply feeding directly into the GPIO pins that should be able to handle anything the system throws at it, but that won't be ready for public consumption for a couple more months.
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In the meantime, order one of these: a.co/d/1iQcW01 and power your Rpi directly to the 5VDC GPIO pins. The Rpi is specced to handle up to 5.2VDC on the GPIO pins, so hopefully you'll get one that gives you 5.1VDC. I've used several of these during my testing and it was the solution to all the little glitches I was having. Solid as a rock.
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John,

After making the above post, the autofocus started failing when I got into the Narroband filters. And I won't say it "failed", there are just some settings that need to be tweaked. When the routine received the first Ha image, it took about 4 minutes to solve and showed thousands of stars. Something is going on with the data from the 'Ha' and 'Sii' filters (didn't mess with Oiii) that needs to be tweaked. I'm zipping the night's images and datalogs now and will send you a link via DM in a bit.

However, I am thrilled to have LRGB autofocus working now which was the last piece I needed to have kstars fully functional on my system.

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Made all the changes you suggested and AF - SEP is working great!! Sitting in back yard running the Build Filter Offsets tool to give it a workout and it’s running smooth.

I’ll upload the log files and pictures later to my NAS for you.

Not sure how many karmas I can give you, but I would have never figured this out on my own.

Thank you again, John!!!

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With the HEM27EC mount, I think the handset is required since that is where the WiFi and processor are located. I would also like to get away from having a handset dangling off the mount, but I can also see why they would want to go that route since all of the brains are easier to replace.
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One thing I would like to see them do is release an "AP" firmware version that is stripped down to just what we need. No databases, or goto-ing, ect. That would also open up room for other functions like hard RA/DEC limits for folks using a tripod with long scopes.
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I'm starting to suspect that my problem was that one of the other parking positions other than 0/0 got loaded into the handset. I looked thru the iOptronV3 INDI driver and all it sends is a "park" command to the mount, so the handset then interprets where Park is. There are some functions in the INDI driver to send park positions, but I don't believe that I've ever used them.
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Keith replied to the topic 'Moving Stellarmate OS to an NVME SSD' in the forum. 4 months ago

I've left my Rpi-5 w/NVME drive running for two days now. . . no connection issues.

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Keith replied to the topic 'Moving Stellarmate OS to an NVME SSD' in the forum. 4 months ago

That sounds like a Raspberry Pi OS problem. Maybe file a ticket?

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Keith replied to the topic 'Moving Stellarmate OS to an NVME SSD' in the forum. 4 months ago

Good to hear. . . sorry I can't help you with the ethernet issue. . .

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Fredrick, What parking problems did you have? I have an iOptron HEM27EC and occasionally when it gets the Park command from ekos, it will start rotatating East past the zero point. I don't know how far it would have gone since I was able to get to the power switch. I still haven't been able to find out what specific conditions cause that problem.

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Keith replied to the topic 'Moving Stellarmate OS to an NVME SSD' in the forum. 4 months ago

Peter,

I have a full .img file for running Stellatmate OS from an NVME drive on an Rpi-5. Send me a PM and I'll give you the link.

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John,

Thank you again for looking at this. I've printed off screenshots of your recommendations and will be trying them next time I go out. .

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John,

It looks like Ring Mask is what I'll be using. Does the blue circle adjust to give me a graphical representation of the sensor area it is regarding for autofocus?

My current relation ship with Field Flatteners: "Agree to Disagree" . . . it's not an optical disagreement, but a mechanical one. When I switched to Mono this winter, the shop I bought from sent a field flattener with the camera and filter wheel. The first problem was getting the 55mm backfocus - I had the wrong camera. So sent that one back to get the short backfocus version. Then that one had a color sensor installed . . . yay . . . so sent that one back. Finally got the 55mm backfocus and now the flattener wouldn't fit without ordering a custom adapter which probably couldn't be fabricated anyway to keep 55mm. So sent that flattener back and ordered the Explore Scientific flattener . . . which, you guessed, didn't fit without major mechanical acrobatics either . . . Around March timeframe, I'm watching the nights slip by and had some discussions with my club members and have decided to just move forward with the known issue and consciously work around it until the perfect field flattener comes along.

Anyone out there know of a flattener with simple 2" threads on the input and output side? Why one doesn't exist, I don't know or I haven't been able to find it.

My thinking at this point is to work the center 1/3 of the sensor and either crop or BlurX the corners. This camera also has the option in the INDI driver to crop the image at the sensor, so that is another option to avoid the corners.

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John,

Thank you for figuring this out!! My error for not posting what equipment I'm using to get the frames. I haven't had any trouble with plate solving so far, that seems to work well. Do the two modules share functions?

-ED-127 scope at 952mm focal length - no field flattener.
-QHY600 mono camera set to Gain of 26. This is the advertised "unity" gain for this camera so I'd like to not move it unless absolutely necessary.
-Antila filter set - Luminance for the frames

Could the corner stars be an issue? Is there a way to have autofocus only use the center stars for autofocus? I haven't found a field flattener that fits my scope yet, so my plan for now is to crop out the bad stars or (BlurX them) in the corners.

I will input your settings and record more frames to see how it works. I am still trying to get a full set of offsets for all of my filters.

I am coming from NINA / Windows, so I'm keen to get kstars/ekos working smoothly with my setup (Rpi-5).

I'll be happy to help test any new settings or updates you'd like to try. Assuming we can get some clear nights here. . .

-Keith

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John, Curious if you've had a chance to look at the logs and frames I sent you the link?

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OK, thanks!! I'll get that updates soon.
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I was looking around the other dialog boxes and saw that I never set my "microns / tick", so I got out the calipers and came up with 1.62uM/tick vs. the 5uM/tick that it was defaulted to. Hopefully that will help get it working.
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I tried SEP again the last night I was out and still couldn't get it to recognize stars. This time I saved the exposures and am Zipping everything into a file.
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John, I'll send you a link to download the whole shebang thru DM . .
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