StellarMate is a small mobile astronomy gadget that you can connect your astronomy devices to. It enables you to control your mount, camera, focuser, filter wheel, dome, and many more devices. Designed for astrophotgorahy, it includes free powerful astrophotography tool that supports mount control, batch capture, autofocus, autoguide, and astrometry.

The gadget include several methods that enables you to connect your equipment. StellarMate communication channels include 4x USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 MBPS Ethernet, 802.11n Wireless LAN, and Bluetooth 4.0. You connect your equipment to StellarMate using any of the supported communication channels. Once connected, you can use a mobile (Phone & Tablet) or desktop (Windows, MacOS, Linux) application to control your equipment.

You need equipment (Mounts, Cameras, Focuser...etc) that can be connected to a computer via either USB, Bluetooth, or Ethernet. All modern gadget include connectors to computers. For mount with Serial connectors, you will need to purchase a Serial-2-USB adapter. Since StellarMate uses INDI for device control, you need to make sure your device is supported. While not strictly required, it is highly recommened to use an external powered USB hub to connect your devices to.

To use the StellarMate App, you need either an Android or iOS based smart phone.

You can connect to StellarMate via the following methods:

• Direct Connection: Plug the supplied HDMI cable to a monitor to gain direct access to StellarMate OS. You also need to plug your Mouse & Keyboard.
• Wired: Connect StellarMate to your LAN via Ethernet. You can access it like any other device on your network. You can use Network Discovery tools on your operating system (e.g. Avahi/Bonjour). to detect it as it advertises its services over the network.
• Wireless: Use StellarMate App for Android and iOS to connect to your gadget.

No. Upgrading to 18.04 will likely break your system. Please wait until there is an official StellarMate OS image with 18.04 support. 

No, it's not broken. That's the normal behavior. Here are what the LED lights mean:

Red LED

• Keeps steady on when powered.
• Flashes if the power drops below ~4.63V.

Green LED

• Steady on if no SD card during boot.

• irregular flashes for SD card access.

So if the Green LED is off, it means there isn't much activity going on. If you cannot detect StellarMate HotSpot on your phone, please use the supplied HDMI cable and connect it to an external TV/Monitor. Check what you get on the TV:

• If you see StellarMate OS desktop, then the unit is working fine. Check the network settings.
  1. Attach a keyboard and mouse (wireless would work as well).
  2. Click on StellarMate Tools App.
  3. Click on Network Reset. Confirm network reset.
  4. Reboot the unit.
• If you see error messages on the console, there there is a problem in booting up the Operating System. If you have StellarMate OS image, then the best course of action is to reflash the image. Check the integrety of the microSD cards as they tend to degrade with time. If you do not have StellarMate OS image, Contact support so we can help you resolve this issue.

There are many mobile and desktop applications that you can use to control StellarMate. For a complete list, please check INDI Clients page.

However, only Ekos and StellarMate App are officially supported.

username: stellarmate

password: smate

To reset StellarMate, use VNC or connect via HDMI and click on the StellarMate Tools icon on the desktop as illustrated below:

After clicking the icon, a small window shall popup with two buttons:

• Network Reset: Click this button to reset WiFi settings in case you have issues accessing the unit via WiFi or HotSpot. It will restore StellarMate to HotSpot mode.
• Factory Reset: Click this button to reset all settings, including WiFi. This action is irreversible! Please make sure to backup any important data on the SD card!

StellarMate must now be restarted for the above to take effect.

Usual Cause

StellarMate HotSpot is only active when StellarMate is not connected to any network.

If you connect StellarMate to your WiFi network, or if you connect StellarMate to LAN via Ethernet, then the HotSpot is deactivated. It is only reactivated again when there is no network to reach.

Other Causes

1. Failure to bootup: If the unit cannot be reached in any method (WiFi, Ethernet..etc) then connect HDMI cable + keybaord and see the output on the screen. StellarMate is quite tolerance to power off but sometimes part of the SD card gets corrupted and requires manual intervention.

 

An editor will open, press the arrow key down to go to the bottom of the editor. You will see a parameter called FSCKFIX=no change the no to a yes

 

 

After that, press Ctrl+O to save the file and then press enter.

 

 

Then press Ctrl+X to exit the editor. Finally type in sudo reboot to reboot StellarMate and press enter:

 

 

StellarMate should hopefully bootup normally next time.

2. Wrong Home WiFi password: If you entered a wrong home WiFi password, this can lead to HotSpot dropping while not being able to establish connection to the Home WiFi Network. The recommended solution is to use HDMI+Keyboard to login to StellarMate OS, and then reset the WiFi network from the StellarMate Tools App on the desktop. After restarting the unit, the HotSpot should automatically come up.

StellarMate WiFi HotSpot password: stellar@mate

To change default password, follow the steps in this vide:

By default, the unit hostname is stellarmate.local

From StellarMate App, go to My Mates then select your unit. The hostname is the unit name. If you changed the unit name, then just use the name followed by .local

For example, if you changed the unit name to observatory, then your new hostname is observatory.local

Another way to find the hostname is to open the Web Manager from the StellarMate App and you will see the unit hostname in the browser address bar.

If you using StellarMate Web Manager, please add SkySafari driver to your Auxiliary drivers. From within Ekos, select SkySafari from Auxiliary.

For complete instructions, please visit SkySafari INDI support page.

Please follow instrucitons in Controlling your Mount with Joystick tutorial.

Use Web-Based VNC Viewer or any VNC Viewer to access StellarMate. Simply double click the Software Updater icon to fetch updates. If there are any available updates, a window shall appear with the required upgrades. Click Install to download and install them. It is recommended to restart the unit after installation updates.

If for any reason you are having problems with the GUI Software Updater, you can directly write a command to start update process. Double click the Mate Terminal icon and a terminal window shall be opened. Type in the following command and press enter:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Yes. Use port 5624 to login to StellarMate using your username and password. The same port should be used for SFTP (e.g. in FileZilla). You can perform remote update using the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

StellarMate ships with 16GB MicroSD card and over 9.5GB of free space to store images on.

1. If you are using Ekos on PC/Mac, then you need to set Upload mode to Local and then set the Remote Directory to /home/stellarmate/Pictures as illustrated below:

2. If you are using Ekos directly on StellarMate, simply set the Directory field in the capture module to /home/stellarmate/Pictures. The Upload mode should remain as Client.

/home/stellarmate/Pictures is case sensitive. Make sure not to set it by mistake to /home/stellarmate/pictures

If you are using USB2 cameras from ZWO, they must be flashed with the -compatible firmware in order to be used with StellarMate.

Download the ASI Cameras Firmware Upgrade Tool for your OS and flash the camera with the -compatible firmware. For example, if you camera is ASI120MM, then flash the camera with this file: ASI120MM-compatible.iic

This is not required for USB3 cameras.

No.

StellarMate is based on Open Astronomy Instrumentation Protocol (INDI) and does not use ASCOM. INDI enables native remote control of your equipment and numerous devices are supported by manufacturers today. Ekos is the officially supported client, but you can also use over 15+ clients on across many operating systems.

It is possible to connect to StellarMate directly without going via a router. Simply connect an ethernet cable from your PC/Mac to StellarMate. There is no need to use a crossover cable, any regular Ethernet cable would do. You can access StellarMate as you would normally do via the address http://stellarmate.local:8624

Under some circumstances, the PC/Mac cannot recognize the direct connection immediately. To force it to connect with StellarMate, find out what auto-IP address was created by StellarMate. This information can be found in StellarMate Web Manager. Use WiFi to connect to the StellarMate hotspot, and click on the information icon to display StellarMate info.

From the example screenshot above, we know the auto-IP address is 169.254.10.197. Now open the terminal application in your operating system and simply type:

ping 169.254.10.197

After which the PC/Mac should register the IP address and you can start using stellarmate.local address as usual.

A more permenant solution involves creating a static IP address on StellarMate using Network Manager.