Kring Now power up the AAP, wait for beeps, I confirm SSP is still tracking Matar while I wait
Launch ASIair app from scratch, so I get start screen, select my devices and proceed
This could be where the ASIAIR gets disoriented from the mount.
My impression is that ASIAIR assumes that the mount is Homed when you connect ASIAIR to it.
it didn't get that from the mount, it made it up or has it cached from some other day.
This is the scary part. ASIAIR likes to make things up out of the clear blue sky, instead of obtaining the information from the mount (which is what I would have done).
I'll keep an eye on this when I run my mount simulator. I.e., pre-position the mount (in my case, a virtual mount) at some location that is not Home, then connect ASIAIR to it, and then issue a GOTO. I have always before this (with both a real mount and with a simulator) been connecting ASIAIR to the mount when the mount is Homed.
Could you please repeat the experiment with ASIAIR unconnected to the mount and with the mount pointed at some star (not Home), just like you did indoors. Then connect ASIAIR, but do a Plate Solve right away. This may force ASIAIR to realize where the mount is really pointed (it should be able to just retrieve it using a protocol command).
In your case, you need to waste a clear night; in my case, the mount simulator will present an image to ASIAIR's camera just as if the camera is pointed at the sky. Using your Matar example, my simulator would display a skychart (a gnomonic tangent plane, to be technically precise) that is centered at Matar. ASIAIR does not know that the camera is pointed at the sky or a display that is drawing a representation of the sky -- a kind og virtual reality).
I take the Mount position in ASIAIR with a grain of salt. It tells you where the mount is, but it is not clear ASIAIR incorporates that information into its own coordinate system.
If I slew to Matar, you can watch the mount in the video goto the wrong side of the sky and point the mount into the dirt.
OK, if we assume that ASIAIR wakes up thinking that it is pointed at Home (i.e., it is too stupid to use the Mount's current location). If you add the RA and declination change from Home take the difference in RA and declination to Matar, then add that delta to the RA and declination of Matar itself, do the numbers show that ASIAIR is moving the mount into the ground?
If that is true, then what ASIAIR is missing is the important step of establishing the reference RA and declination from the mount when it first connects. ASIAIR code may be idiotic enough to send a sync to the mount, with Home as the sync parameter! If that is what happened, the mount now thinks its current motor position (pointed at Matar) is actually its Home.
To be fair, many cheap mounts do not know where home is. Cheap mounts makes you manually position the motors so that the axes points to Home, and then a computer will tell it to use that position as the Home position. (The RST-135 I have has a Home command. It has sensors that detects where home is.)
point the mount into the dirt.
At least your video shows just the dovetail plate pointing to dirt, instead of smashing an OTA that costs 10x the cost of ZWO ASIAIR and ZWO camera combined into the tripod.
Speaking of tripods, the fear of smashing equipment is one reason I use a Tri-pier (I use the William Optics Mortar one). The best is a pier that is mounted into the ground like in real observatories, but a tri-pier does have more clearances than a tripod.
Chen
