This past weekend I took my new telescope setup out to my mom's place for testing. Previously, I was connecting my Celestron NexStar SLT telescopes to Sky Safari Pro on my iPad, however my iPad is kinda old and the gyroscope isn't working properly and the compass is reversed so it's not working properly anymore. My new setup Includes my Inspiron all-in-one desktop with a TV as a second monitor; the telescope is connected to the computer using a USB cable from the hand control so I can control it with the computer. I also have a Celestron SkySense alignment tool, and a Celestron NexImage Burst camera that also connects to the computer by USB cable so I can capture images. The telescope base takes 8 AA batteries, but I opted to get an external power cable for that as well, connected to a rechargeable power source.
Everything worked great-until it slewed too much and all the cables got wrapped around to base and it wouldn't move anymore. The problem is that the scope arm rotates on the base, and the connectors are all on the rotating part. I consider this an engineering failure, one that I'll have to fox on my end in order to get everything working.
A couple ideas I'm kicking around are going back to the battery pack instead of the external power source (though that will severe limit the use time), and manually aligning the scope before connecting it to the computer (although I don't know if the alignment settings will transfer to the computer after). I plan to take the scopes out to mom's place again this coming weekend for more test