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[telfish]

OK, so I got my non goto Atlas/EQ6 stripped out the board and motors, put in a set of motors and gears from my other Atlas so I could test the EQ 2560 setup.

It works pretty well it slews, it tracks. However I have two issues probably setup settings.

If I set the slew to Max in eqmod the scope slews and stalls. If I set it to 400 it slews fine though obviously slower than I would like. I am guessing there is a setting in one of the files to set the maximum slew speed, a pointer would be good.

The other thing which is a bit weird is that although I have set the home position correctly and it returns to home properly. When I slew to the zenith it points due east and when I points east it points to the zenith!

So it's 90 degrees out. If I set the scope horizontal at home position it is fine. I will check the position of the saddle in case the last owner turned it for some reason.

Oh and the last thing. I am using the 8255 drivers on a 2560, the motors are still energized when the mount is parked. Is there any way to change this in the config file?

[TCWORLD]

The motors being energized in park is EQMOD leaving them energised to ensure the mount doesn't move (once you turn off a stepper motor, it has no torque so the motor may rotate under any backlash). AstroEQ has no concept of "parked", nor is there anything in the synta protocol for parking. The only way to turn the motors of would be for EQMOD to send the command to turn them off.

I don't know if EQMOD has an option to change what the max speed, the sliders always goes up to 800x. If that is causing the motors to stall, you simply need to slew slower.

If the scope is 90 degrees out, it may be that one or both of the motors is turning in the wrong direction. You can change the direction of an axis with the "Forward"/"Backward" buttons in the config utility.

[telfish]

Thanks I spent a lot of time on this and solved everything except the slew at 90 degrees thing.

I put the board from my other mount in to test and it worked fine, slewed to the right place etc. Then I reconnected the 2560 and tested that, RA was reversed so fired up the utility and it was normal, so I reversed it and that was fine. However I cant get the DEC to change from the utility, whether I have it reversed or not it is always 90 degrees offset anti clockwise. So if I ask it to point to the zenith it points due north.

It's strange that I can reverse one axis and not the other.

[telfish]

Scratch that. I just reversed the connections to the DEC and it's fine now. All working well and a happy camper. Now to get wifi going and I will be all set.