SnakeyJ

Well done Gina - it's been a long journey and you have tried everything humanly possible.   Hopefully you can catch up on your imaging time now and get some great images with the new scope and mount!

Should get a good run in tonight Gina and no moon to limit your options - Look forward to seeing some great shots from the new setup.

Thank you Steve   It was lovely meeting you too   I take on far too many projects really

No such thing as too many projects, the only hard limits are time and money!

Look forward to seeing your Jupiter image James - hope it;s better than my efforts tonight.   Nice to see you out field testing though

Good luck with some PI James, you've worked long and hard on this and deserve a night off!

I suspect the good conditions will be short lived, so make the most

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

I can't help wondering though...  So many of these companies claim "trade secrets", "giving away competetive advantage" or other such guff when asked about releasing the source for their drivers.  For the most part I reckon that's a load of cobblers.  Many of the cameras are built around well-known chipsets.  Anyone who is reasonably competent (enough to write their own driver, at least) and desperate to understand what's going on at the PC side of the interface can easily get hold of the necessary tools to reverse engineer the software enough to re-write it.  And re-writing one probably wouldn't take that long either.  I think it's far more likely the story is "we don't want to", "the lawyers won't let us" or "we're too embarrassed to".  The camera firmware may be a different case, but few people are asking for that to be open source.

James

Think you hit a few nails on the head with this - and it certainly seems that Aptina are particularly hot on the NDAs and the documentation for their sensors.   The semi conductor market is certainly cut throat and very protective of its design/competitive edge, which is entirely reasonable, but I also tend to think there's a culture of glossing over and denying the imperfections.    Like so many tech industries the majority of code output relies heavily on historic development and I suspect many companies don't retain the knowledge/staff to go back and chase the bugs out of older portions of code.

If I were president, I'd legislate for all companies release full source for anything over 10 years old - though companies and even governments are likely to end up red faced

James - might be worth posting in the QHY Forum for some more info on this, they are increasingly more active on the lInux side lately with the development on their Intercam Series cams.   QuiHy I think is the boss and responds to most posts, but LZR is one of the developers and might be more helpful.   Otherwise Torsten @ Firecapture knows a lot of the developers and may be able to point you in the right direction.

How does the SDK support look from ZWO for the ASI120's - seems to me that this is actually in more widespread use as a planetary camera, with most of the QHY5L-IIs being used for guide, though there is little practical difference between the two and both companies seem to have had their own issues with software/driver support.     The Pt Grey cameras are probably more of a niche, probably due to cost - though the software and SDK support from Pt Grey seems very comprehensive, due to their industrial focus.

Good luck on the Alpha launch!

You're making some excellent progress on this James - despite uncovering a world of gotchas in V4L2, the camera SDKs, video encoding and teaching yourself QT on the fly!   IMO a darn good effort over 2 weeks, sandwiched between work and family life!

Pretty sure that a modern multi core desktop/laptop will have stacks of spare cpu/gpu for doing the debayering and scoring as a pre-process and that the USB bus and disk i/o will be the limiting factors.   With the Pi's you'll be limited by both processor and mediocre i/o to SDHC - which is going to be a challenge to say the least     Though I can see the possibilities for a small form (micro/min ITX) low power system running full time in an obsy under linux.

Here's an example of the problem, this time from my capture program:

I think the fact that this happens in both my capture code and in their demo program which share no common code above the C/C++ and USB libraries strongly suggests to me that the likely cause is their library.

James

I've seen very similar results from my QHY5L-II in one of the firecapture betas, though it was solved by reseting the camera - perhaps more to do with the timing issues at a hardware level.

that's another misconception re collimation I feel. although you are right in a way that you need to be adjusting the average f4 primary (especially a larger one) a little more often than say a f5 mirror, the process is exactly the same and both need to be adjusted accurately to get the best from the scope; neither is more difficult and if you can accurately collimate an f5 you can also just as easily do so for an f4. e.g. my 12" f4 needs the most minor of tweaks to the primary only (often I don't bother it's so close). bear in mind that my observations were with relatively narrow field plossls and might have been very different had I been comparing a cheap 82 degree eyepiece with my Nagler.

Shane,

That's ok - nothing in the EP case over 70deg fov at present and most are 60deg!    The ES82s or even Naglers are a long way down my wish list for the time being as I'm slowly mulling the CCD and imaging rig in the observatory and currently have the 6" achro on the lawn for visual - though this may go in favour of 10-12" dob at some point (three might be pushing things on both the domestic and storage side).

I do have the Standard SW Coma Corrector, which many have used @F4 on their quattro's - though it's really designed for F5 and the Parracor, Rowe and the new SW Aplanatic should be better with wider fields at F4.

All good stuff to think of, though I'm subverting Imad's original thread so will go away and ponder this for a while.

Thanks Moonshane for highlighting your earlier post on EP Comparisons at F4 - certainly food for thought, I was under the false impression that that the low focal ratio reflectors would be almost useless for visual without the expensive Paracorr or matched coma correctors.    Your impressions with even the budget EPs suggest that for visual they can still give very reasonable views.    Though I do appreciate that the collimation will need considerably more attention at F4 than F5 - though for a static setup in my new obs this could be far simpler to maintain.

Certainly food for thought with a 10" quattro replacing the 200P - though a mount upgrade will have to be on the agenda!

Just seen an interesting post from John in another SGL thread:

Heres a company that does scope hire:

http://www.darkskytelescopehire.co.uk/

I don't know how much business they do though 

This business hires dobs between 6 & 12" - so this could be a really good way of trying before making that final buying decision.    They also happen to have a 12" Orion Optics dob, which looks very tempting to me.

Imad,

Worth noting that the orion optics dobs have a lighter and more compact mount. Optically they are also favourably reviewed in comparison with the Skywatcher and GSO equivalents.

Generally the flextubes are heavier than solid tubes, but more compact for storage and can be split down for moving.

Jake

german dob...http://www.missing-lynx.com/reviews/german/dorareviewdh_1.html

Don't suppose Kellingheath is on the branch line?

Whoops - couldn't resist!  An impressive 36" dob well Mallets Mortar if I'm honest    The specs are F3.6 - apparently is lobbed a 2400lb shell 1.5 miles!

I'm sure they've mounted that big frac in the background the wrong way around!

Cheers Gib007,

I've tried the file permissions, resetting them to allow all users full control of files within my capture and cgywin folders, though I'm still getting the same error.

I've even licensed my neb3, though this was long planned

It won't even work on the open file dialogue selected - I did find some similar threads on CN and other forums, which advised re-installing the cgywin folder - though this is also unsuccessful. Guess I'll remove and install from scratch again.

Sorry to hijack your thread, but do appreciate the assistance and again thanks for a great tutorial - it'll be fantastic if I can get this working and sure it's only a matter of time and persistance!

Almost, but no cigar - managed to get this installed and configured according to the tutorial, and it seems to be talking ok to the mount and my camera QHY5L-II in Neb3 with the ascom driver. However it fails very quickly on resolving typically between 1-2 secs. Looking at the info log it seems to be a problem with finding the output files, or the file format. Feels like it's 90% there, but not quite:

Info log:

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Connecting to camera...

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.00 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:13,736 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:16,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 0.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:17,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Waiting for camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading image from camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Solving...

2013-09-04 22:41:18,438 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading input file 1 of 2: "20"...

2013-09-04 22:41:19,040 - astrotortilla - INFO - ERROR: Image type not recognized: Could not determine file type (does the file exist?): 20

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - ioutils.c:605:run_command_get_outputs Command failed: return value 255

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - augment-xylist.c:585:backtick Failed to run command: /usr/lib/astrometry/bin/image2pnm.py --sanitized-fits-outfile /tmp/tmp.sanitized.58MzV8 --fix-sdss --infile 20 --uncompressed-outfile /tmp/tmp.uncompressed.6xsYqc --outfile /tmp/tmp.ppm.TFMiSu --ppm

2013-09-04 22:41:19,282 - astrotortilla - INFO - No solution in 1.8s

Config file attached if SGL allows:

AT QHY5L-IIM.txt

I am using the neb3 demo/unregistered, so appreciate that my capture files will have lines through them, which won't help the solver process - but wanted to check it worked prior to buying the license My capture laptop is running Win7 x64.

Small FoV cameras do demand a fair amount of space for the indices - 31.5GB in my cygwin folder!

Glad I left the downloads running overnight, as it was only 13.5GB when I gave up and left the office last night.

Will go through the rest of the tutorial tonight. Cloud is forecast for the next couple of nights, so should give me something to play with.

Thanks Gib007, great tutorial and looking forward to getting it all up and running - but the downloads are killing me and my imaging laptop! With the small fov on my QHY5L-II, I downloading indexes for 2.75' to 30' - 9GB and still going after 3hrs! Every time it gets to the end of 3GB of data it starts off on another 3GB.

I did get a little concerned when the estimated remaing time peaked at 8 days

Looks like I might be having a night off tonight and leave the imaging laptop at work to complete the downloads;)

Mike,

Good to see that came down and transported so well - The new garden/obsy site looks fantastic (great horizon) and the attached warm room looks big enough for a bunkbed and small kitchen!

Enjoy - Jake

Thanks Pete, these look extremely useful for the arduino supply and are probably cheaper than the cost of components to build yourself. However, I did have a good look yesterday, but couldn't see one of these rated to supply the 2V 6A for the TEC - max current appears to be 2-3A without heatsink or 4-5A with heat sink fitted. As the TEC will be drawing quite a high current I will need to source something with similar with a higher rating. Shouldn't be too hard now you've set me on the right track.

Many thanks for the advice and pointer - Jake

Can anyone offer advice or pointers for making a DC Stepdown Voltage Regulator?

I would like to take a nominal 13V DC supply from a regulated transformer or Power Tank and provide 5V DC 1A (to power 2-3 arduino nano V3s) and 2V DC 6A outputs (which will provide power for a small TEC, via a Logic N Channel Mosfet - FQP30N06L).

I'm keen to avoid too many wires, so ideally this would fit in a single project box with the controllers and not generate too much heat - but it could also be two small project boxes mounted back to back.

Actually it might be useful to have a little more 5V to power a small USB hub.

Great progress on the build and good to hear that you were set up and working last night, with barely 3 months left to go in situ. Look forward to seeing some of the results from your session.

Looking very nice - enjoy the unusually clear skies this week

Great progress - great to be outside building in this perfect weather.

Ryan, good point on the dome - might well invite the wrong sort of attention and be a worry.

My misses wouldnt mind too much as long as it looked neat and tidy - but a posh shed may be better camouflage.