INDI is rock solid. The software works incredibly well.
The client -- has some things it needs work on. The dialog for location, has no concept in it of direction, although allows for non-directional values to be inputted into it. This design needs to take a page out of the book of every other planetarium. I set mine to what SkySafari said, verbatim, and my mount as a result was sent off in directions that were laughable. The client settings for the location data, needs to be fool proof. Fools like me, apparently, will get stumbled by this.
The rotation.... Oh my. The camera can have images plate solved by it, that give the camera angle... and the rotator has two (identical) values that do zero good for trying to rotate the image how you want it. I can do this in 3 seconds in SGP, I spent 30 minutes trying to get KStars to do this, and had to repeatedly abort the rotation via my NiteCrawler in the INDI driver, because it just kept spinning. This is not good.
The planetarium is apparently not something well integrated with the software. I moved my FOV indicator, and that did nothing to change where the scope could possibly slew. When I clicked on the object (Crescent Nebula) it kept calling it "Empty Sky in Cygnus". The only way I could get it to actually work correctly was to look up the object in the database and tell it to slew to it. That is not intuitive at all.
What needs to happen is that the client here needs to get to the same level as other software like SGP. SGP doesnt even have a planetarium built into it and yet as soon as I unplugged the Pi and plugged in my Windows laptop, things just worked. Without me spending large amounts of time trying to explain to KStars what I was trying to accomplish.
This is far off the mark, no offense intended, and it doesnt need to be. The last problem I had before I gave up was that KStars just crashed with no dialog about it. It just disappeared. That also is not good.
The client -- has some things it needs work on. The dialog for location, has no concept in it of direction, although allows for non-directional values to be inputted into it. This design needs to take a page out of the book of every other planetarium. I set mine to what SkySafari said, verbatim, and my mount as a result was sent off in directions that were laughable. The client settings for the location data, needs to be fool proof. Fools like me, apparently, will get stumbled by this.
The rotation.... Oh my. The camera can have images plate solved by it, that give the camera angle... and the rotator has two (identical) values that do zero good for trying to rotate the image how you want it. I can do this in 3 seconds in SGP, I spent 30 minutes trying to get KStars to do this, and had to repeatedly abort the rotation via my NiteCrawler in the INDI driver, because it just kept spinning. This is not good.
The planetarium is apparently not something well integrated with the software. I moved my FOV indicator, and that did nothing to change where the scope could possibly slew. When I clicked on the object (Crescent Nebula) it kept calling it "Empty Sky in Cygnus". The only way I could get it to actually work correctly was to look up the object in the database and tell it to slew to it. That is not intuitive at all.
What needs to happen is that the client here needs to get to the same level as other software like SGP. SGP doesnt even have a planetarium built into it and yet as soon as I unplugged the Pi and plugged in my Windows laptop, things just worked. Without me spending large amounts of time trying to explain to KStars what I was trying to accomplish.
This is far off the mark, no offense intended, and it doesnt need to be. The last problem I had before I gave up was that KStars just crashed with no dialog about it. It just disappeared. That also is not good.