RoWal

The hole setup is powered via the same 12V 40A powersupply, the mount is connected via the original USB cable from mount to PC - no hub or similar in between.. however, it is interessting that you bought a new, longer USB cable, When we bought the mount We tried a new USB cable - the new cable did not work. So Mike: What cable did you buy from where? - it might be worth replacing the old cable - the do age... /R

Hi I am part of a small team using a DDM60 pro and autoslew in a remote obervatory. We have had this setup for 2,5 years now and have har some crashees of autoslew occationaly sin the start. But during the last 12 month the issue of a crashing autoslew has been increasingly frequent. Has some of you noticed similar behaviour? Our setup is permanetly setup in a remote observatory and user fairly frequent. We have had a lot of communication error issues that has been resonably keept at bay via cleaning and applying contact spray, but recently this issue is increasing, getting more frequent harder to mittigate. We also have issues with stiction in the mount bearings (our percieved root cause;), over 1-3 hours drivning the motor currents up to a point where on or the other motor is turned of, occationally resulting in the sope pointing in strange directions when our imaging software (starkeeper voyager) detects the failure and tries to end session and park the scope... We have balances, tuned and tried lots of adjustmets to get as perfect conditions as possible, we also have created a parallell software that detects hig currents and send an event to voyager to pause - performs a number of release sleews and the signals voyager to resume - this works most of the times but.. We are now reaching out to all of you owner of a ddm60 (or ddm85) that uses Autoslew, -have you also had reoccuring crashing issues? -have you come up with potential solutions/workarounds that mitigate the issues? -have anybody been in contact with ASA? Is Autoslew/Sequence totally retired products? -any suggestions to what can be done to Autoslew/Sequence to allow our nice mounts to keep on being able to be used? (maing Autoslew, parts om sequence open source?) Kind Regards Roger / Team SDST @ e-eye spain

Hi I am part of a small team and we have a DDM60 in a remote observatory, occationally we have seen unstable tracking, and also had tha RA or DEC motor turn off due to high currents... You sat you had your mount for over a year, is it permanently mounted in an obseratory? Our specific issue has probably a range of root causes... 1. When starting a night sessions motor currents are OK, but increases over and hour or two until reching the levels when you start getting positino errors in the servo log, eventually motor(s) are turned off due to to high currents (+3.0 A) - this will of cource create lines in stead of round start 1.1 One potential reason for motor currents to increse over a time is internal stiction due to... clumping of grease in the bearings.. an issue I have been researching and discussing with bearing experts.. and that is not discussed much enough in the astro photograpy community, it takes a few yeas for this issue to arise as the mount has to be exposed to moisty condition - as i will be in a permanently mounted observatory (.. if the observatoruy is not in a geographically dry location ;). We believe this is our major problem... the best solution is to replace standard bearing grease with high grade white lithuim grease that is very resiliant against aiging (clumping du to absorbing moist over time).. the short term practcal solution is .. release slews - ensure the mounts svings around a number of times befor a night session, manually och via somkind of script (we have a script solution). 2. Communication issues. We have found out that the USB cable between the computer and th mount must be high quality, Autoslew has intens communication going on with the mount and is VERY sensitive to interferece or poor connectivity... This is an issue we are having right now. Of cource moist condition play an importat role here as well... it affects the connectors. We now has to order regulas cleaning and apply contact spray to the connectors - the reduces the issue fom some time, but the isse appears to gradually increase over time so we will probaly have to do som serious maintenece before end of 2024... 3. Alignment and or pointing model issues.. we have found it is very beneficial to take time to get an as accurate polar adjustment as possible, we have use the QHY polemaster to set the polar adjustment, we run it 3-4 times to make it as good as possible. The we have set up sequence and make a pointing model we redo the model 2-3 times a year.. 4. Configuration issues, balancing and performing tuning of the motor currents (PID setttings) make big difference, This can be really tricky due to the fact we operate remotely.. so balancing require we call in local service staff.. but most of the tuning we can do remote (not the parts requiring tapping the scope to manuellay se PID parameters though),, So.. as you can se we have a range of issues that all come inte play, and we have to deal with them remotely... So if you have not solved you issues i wuls suggest -Check cables, clean and apply som contact spray to reduce potential communication issues -Find your way to make "release" slews to remedy potiential grease clumping in the bearings in your mount (If you want I can describe this issue in more detail..) -Be VERY thorough when balancing your mount, watching the balancing graph is not accurate enounh, open a command window an tail the servo log as the currents are displayed in the log and that gives much higher accuracy... Finally - When everyting works, this is a fantastic mount, we easily have 10 minutes unguided subs, we tried 15 min, it works but is impractical nowadays due to all the satellites etc that reduces sub quality with good precision And, hope some of what I described here may come in use for you