Firmware Upgrade on StarSense

In order to resolve issues I have with my StarSense camera – see here – I’ve decided to upgrade the firmware on my Celestron 11” EdgeHD and its CGX-L mount.

There is a number of descriptions out there that mainly evolve around doing the firmware update using an USB cable. From my experience, this is no longer required – the update can be done using Wifi, if you have the SkyPortal Wifi Module.

For this description, I assume that you have set the Wifi Module up to work in Access Point mode, and that you know the Telescope’s IP Address on your network. Let’s assume this IP address to be 192.168.1.121.

I am going to follow up this description assuming you are doing the subsequent steps from a Mac – there are plenty of descriptions out there on how to install the required software on a Windows machine; I’m going to do it from a Mac.

The first thing you need to do is to download the Celestron Firmware Manager application from Celestron. Go to that link and download the Zip file that should be most current. As of this writing, this is:

Once you’ve downloaded the ZIP file, it should have been automatically extracted beneath your download folder:

Notice that at this point you should not yet have the Packages folder. This will be created once you run the program. To do so, I open a Terminal Window (you can find the Terminal just using the spotlight search) and run the application like so:

The application should start up like so:

I took the time to wait for the packages to finish downloading.

Select the Options Menu and chose Connections… – then Select WiFi as connection type, and under Default Port Settings, select WiFi as well and enter the IP address of the telescope.

Press OK. In my case I had to close the application and re-open it. It would then take a while and ultimately find my Telescope and all it’s devices on the network:

I then finally hit the “Update” Button and waited. The Teleskope, the StarSense camera and Hand Controller, the Motors etc. would all be updated.

Warning!

Really do wait for the update to complete once you’ve clicked the update button. I did not do that, and that led me to the Hand Controller essentially no longer responding:

If that happens to you, try the following: Switch off the scope, then press and hold the Logo key (lower left corner) and at the same time the number key “4” on the Hand Controller, and keep them pressed as you switch on the scope. You should get a message that you are now in an “Aux” mode. At this point, you should be able to re-try our update from the point of view of the CFM application. This update was uploading 6 files in my case, and it took about 20 minutes.

So once you have updated everything, close the CFM application, and go to your scope. You should be able to switch off, and then switch back on the scope. When switching on, I pressed and held down the “0” key on the Hand Controller; this forces a factory reset, and may not be necessary for you. I assume it would also make the Hand Controller forget all the previous alignments that you may have stored.

Here are the results of the update on my side:

StarSense HC
   Ver: 01.16.16055      01.19.19003
   Bld: Feb 24 2016      Jan 3 2019
        22:06:33         14:09:10
 StarSense Camera
   Ver: 01.02.13343      01.02.13343
 Motor Control
   Mdl: AstroFi          CGXL
   Azm Ver: 7.13         7.15
   Alt Ver: 7.13         7.15
 P:System
   Ver: 01.01.15218      01.01.19003
 P:LISA
   Ver: 01.01.14072      01.01.14072
 DBOBJ
   Ver: 01.01.14294      01.01.14294

I found it interesting that a newly acquired scope, mount and HC is reported to have  a firmware that’s 3 years old on the HC, and interestingly a wrong model descriptor on the motor control (AstroFi instead of CGXL). Maybe it’s just cosmetic.