Any ideas what I'm doing wrong (ASIAIR+ guiding a CPC 1100)

bobrich

Hi folks,

This video captures the behavior I'm trying to troubleshoot. The ASIAIR+ is connected to the CPC 1100 via the USB cable to Hand Controller. Guide camera is an ASI 462. I see this behavior both when it attached to a 240mm guide scope and in this video it's looking through a Celestron OAG. (I still have some focus/optics issues to work on with it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIZVUd6PRrE

In a nutshell, as soon as I ask it to try to start guiding (around 22 seconds into the video) it attempts to calibrate and everything goes out to lunch. Tracking basically stops (although i can hear a slight action from at least one of the motors). I've tried this orientation and 180 degree camera orientation, brighter stars, dimmer stars, longer/shorter exposure, different gain, different slew speeds in the app and in the HC. etc. This is what happens every single time.

FWIW I've also reset the firmware on the ASIAIR+ to latest and same behavior.

Happy to answer any questions. Thanks!

bobrich

Determined with some help from folks on CN that it was my calibration step config. It was at the default of 2000ms. Bumped it down to 350 and was able to get the east/west part done.

Having another issue now that mount tracking gets disabled when the ASI tries to the backlash correction. Here's a video of that happening, but ZWO support is helping me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3t5mU6XO84 (₂₄ seconds)

Edit: A useful feature for n00bs like me might be to scale the default calibration step based on guide cam FL? Or toss up a little warning if its likely to be a problem.

bobrich

This appears to be due to a bug/compatibility issue with the indi_celestron_gps driver and the CPC 1100 mount. I tried just using KStars + INDI from an Astroberry Pi and reproduced the behavior.

Switching to the Celestron AUX driver and using the PC port on the mount seems to have fixed the issue.

The difference appears to be that the indi_celestron_gps driver does not disable tracking during slewing, but the indi_celestron_aux driver does. There’s a little footnote in one of the Celestron protocol documents that says that if you don’t do this there could be trouble…seems like they are right.

If anyone from ZWO is monitoring this, I replied to TJ on the support ticket to the same effect. Can we please get the indi_celestron_aux driver enabled in the UI? This has the added advantage of letting me skip the hand controller. Right now the ASIAIR cannot be used to control/point my mount.