So I am always looking for new stuff and happened to run into Dylan’s video on QUARCS. I joined up on Discord and tested out the image but it didn’t work on my ASIAIR modded RPi5 but it did work on the stock ASAIR Pro. The big deal here is QUARCS will run from a tablet just like ZWO’s ASIAIR software and you can use ANY Astrophotography hardware you want like QHY, Altair, Atik or even ZWO. As long as the hardware supports INDI everything should work. Oh…and QHY is doing this whole thing as Open Source?!?!?!?! Yeah you read that right this is a project built by the community for the community so I can only imagine this is going to get better and better over time!
Ok so we have loaded tons of software together if you followed my YouTube and or blog posts
Installing the OS
You just need to download the Raspberry Pi Imager https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/. Once you download it you will need to download the QHY Beta of QUARCS, however you need a discord account it sign up https://discord.com/invite/uHTPfJ5uuV. After you log in with Discord you can then download the image under the FAQ
Once you load the image with the Raspberry Pi imager you will want to go back and set the config.txt to support the power ports under the [all] line at the bottom of the config.txt.
[all]
#Enable 12v gpio output
gpio=12,13,26,18=op,dh,puYou can remove any power ports that you don’t want. 12=port1, 13=port2, 26=port2, and 18=port4 under the [all] line at the bottom of the config.txt.
Example of only power ports 1 and 4 being active
[all]
#Enable 12v gpio output
gpio=12,18=op,dh,puQuarcs Application
Next you will download the Quarcs app from the Apple or Android store and then boot up the RPi and if all goes well you can connect and play around
Currently the image is not working with my HEM27 mount so I can’t test it, also I want to play around with seeing if I can get this working on my ASIAIR RPi5 using Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS even though QUARCS is designed to run on Ubuntu 22.04. However Ubuntu is not going back to back rev 22.04 to work on RPi 5’s currently so onward with the modding…
Till next time, clear skies!