Pegasus Astro Forum

I typically control all my astro equipment directly off my mac., My Flatmaster 250 just arrived today and I want to control that via windows so I can use unity and/or nina.

I have mac m1, running parallels, which is in turn running windows 11. I have installed Unity and Nina. but my flatmaster is not being recognized.

Is there anything I am missing from the install? do I need to install any .net framework stuff? ascom drivers? is win 11 a problem?

Does anyone run this software on a mac vm-type setup? I am sort of clueless about if this is even possible before I start banging my head on this.

FWIW, the panel works fine on the mac with the indigo-based software I use there. Seems like nina has more features for flats, so wanted to use this panel with it.

partial answer to my own question., looks like the ascom 6.6 install failed. that would explain a lot....

ok. ascom is installed. Unity is still unable to find the connected flatmaster device.
if anyone has successfully run unity in a win 11 virtual machine, any advice/hints/thoughts are appreciated.

Another thought I had about the device and drivers - when i looked in my windows device manager, found the FlatMaster LED 250 under Other Devices but it had a yellow warning icon.

Some googling and searching led me to believe that this device probably used the ftdi drivers, so I downloaded and tried to install the FTDI Windows-on-ARM64 windows drivers for the device, but that led to message at the end of installation saying it could not find drivers in the package I downloaded.

Feel like this is possible, just need a push in the right direction by pegasus devs.

Thanks

Let me know what happen next it's all working or you still need some help?

I still need help. The device drivers are not working and seeing the flatmaster in my situation

Sure, here are the steps you can follow to troubleshoot the issue of your Flatmaster 250 not being recognized by NINA and Unity on your Windows 11 virtual machine:

Install ASCOM drivers.
Check device manager for your device.
Check connection settings and configure USB passthrough.
Install .NET Framework.
Check software compatibility.

You may need to try a combination of these steps to get everything working properly.

Ascom reinstalled,
Unity and .net reinstalled
USB Passthru is configured and the device status changes when the device is plugged and unplugged (it is recognizing device is plugged in)

With all this, and device plugged in, Device Manager is reporting there are no compatible drivers installed. As I said above, this is an M1 Mac with arm architecture. Do you have a driver that is compatible with M1 Macs?

OK. I have figured out the driver issue, documenting here in case anyone else has issues with Pegasus products on virtual machines on mac, and Pegasus Tech Support can have this info handy for folks having similar issues.

The flatpanel seems to use a 3rd party FTDI com port chipset, and if you are running on a M1 mac or any of the newer mac arm-based machines, then you will need compatible arm drivers.

FTDI has a set of virtual com drivers and you can download them here: https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/
You will need to down the ARM compatible drivers, I downloaded the Windows (desktop) Arm Processor Architecture version.

Unzip, and >>important for parallels users<< you must move the drivers to the C: drive. Drivers will not be found if they remain on a virtual mapped folder like Downloads. I unzipped and moved the ARM64 folder to my c:\ folder.

Next, go to device manager, and right click on the Flatmaster device with the warning icon (shown in earlier message). Select install driver.. and then click Browse my Computer. Select the folder you placed on C: driver, and window should report that the com drivers for device were successfully installed.

Note that the Flatmaster device will no long be in the device list, but you may see a new USB Serial Port device appear in the PORTS section.

Unplug and replug your flat panel.
Start Unity.
Unity will take a moment, and then recognize the flatmaster.

So far, this seems to connect to Unity and Nina. Will experiments some more, but this seems to be a success for now.

Now that's a good news

Yes, it works fine on Parallels but you need to install the FTDI driver for arm64 from FTDI website.