We had moderate success last night. We were able to use the polar alignment scope with the reticle to do a polar alignment on Polaris. Everything worked except for the Power Test. We may have an old battery that is not charging. I have asked Wifred to explain the criteria for a successful battery test. I assume that it is checking for 12 volts at various points in the circuits. This might explain the anomalous need to reboot the router when we arrived Friday morning. Then on Friday evening I had to reboot the pi even though it was powered on. Sometimes the pi will stop working if it doesn’t get enough current. We were able to set up the park position by changing the config file from north to south. We were 180 degrees off, i.e. the cameras were pointed up in park instead of down. We set the home position using the handheld controller. The unit successfully found a target from the target file and slewed to it. We had to set mount_point to 0 so that it bypassed the point feature that was to take an orientation picture of the sky at the beginning of an observation for reference purposes. That feature does not work and is not necessary for data collection. The unit was not successful in automatic mode because of a missing systems package which has now been installed. We were successful in parking the telescope after the aborted observation so the unit seems to be in a safe remote obserations state.
Therese has a plan for easily focusing the cameras by using free software from canon that allows her to see the camera viewer on her computer screen.Therese and I are looking for a time when we can continue working on the roof.Joe
