Solved Avalon Linear and a Mac

Hi Toriqo,
thank you for sharing your experience!.
Honestly this sounds very reasonable path and, to be honest, I am evaluating very similar solutions.

I love Raspberry PIs su I think I would try generation 4 model b, what was the main limit with Stellarmate?

Besides, I am happy to say that people at Cloudmakers are doing really a great job with their suite dedicated to Mac users. AstroTelescope, AstroGuider, AstroImager and all the other apps have native design and coding and work very well, not to mention how gentle and responsive the developers are, always ready to receive users suggestions.

I really like the idea to have the choice of the OS, whether it is Linux, MacOS or whatever else we can make our gear work fine and get the best from it.

I'm proud to say I've helped Peter from cloudmakers.eu a bit with implementing the iOptron driver in AstroTelescope. I also own all of their apps but unfortunately I couldn't make AstroTelescope work with my M-Zero (cable or wifi). Besides, I want EVERYTHING to run on the computer attached to my mount. To not depend on anything else. Hence, the cloudmakers.eu apps are not useful in this case.

The limitations on RPi were related to... wifi. I wanted to have two wifi adapters on it (the one built into RPi4 and another one on USB - TPLink 5GHz in AP mode). The RPi4 wifi to connect to my home wifi and the USB one as an AP. It didn't work, no kernel headers in Ubuntu Mate so I couldn't compile the driver.
Then, hardware limitations. I had to scale down on the fits viewer, remove KStars' sounds and so on. I didn't like that either. It's too slow.

Me too! Great to read that you interacted with Peter, what a nice guy he is! I helped on the iOptron driver as well, with some specific testing and now I am trying to help providing hints and feedback on Avalon mounts.
You know, he gave me very positive opinion about Avalon mounts and this was one of the reasons that convinced me to come to the Avalon world.
I am surprised to read that AstroTelescope didn't work with M-Zero as I am currently using it with my Linear and StarGo. Just for curiosity, check the latest beta you can download from the Cloudmakers forum.

About the RPi, I understand you work from home so I think you made the right choice. In my case I am looking for a portable solution for mobility. Where I go there is almost no chance to have a network connection and I have to power everything by battery, probably in such case RPi can still do the job. What do you think?

My setup is remote ready as well. In case it can't connect to my home wifi, it'll connect to my iPad's wifi which also has a 4G data plan. This way, when I'm out in the field, I only sit in my car controlling the scope from the iPad through VNC

I also am powering everything from a very slim battery, even when I'm at home. Top left of the image in the URL, the one with two little screws on it

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This is a gorgeous setup! Honestly there are many hints that can be acquired just looking at this picture, my compliments!
As far as I can understand, you have a Losmandy plate on which you have mounted the PC, the battery and some sort of USB hub, can't see very well the upper part. Actually you use it as sort of counterweight as well, correct?
About the battery, they look like Lithium-Ions or similar, what was your choice? What about the optics?

Sorry for the many questions, they are driven by the enthusiasm

PS: I was forgetting. I wrote Peter Polakovic about the problems you had with the M-Zero, he asked me to ask you to contact him, if you want, he would like to know more about. If you want I can give you his email address

thanks i have his email address, i'll send him a message soon. regarding the equipment, the usb hub is a pegasus astro pocket powebox (i have the ultimate model too but it's too big for this setup). the optical tubes are both william optics, redcat51 and uniguide. the battery is a 26000mA li-polimer.
and yes, you're right, i'm using all those to balance the mount