jiberjaber

4 minutes ago, Gina said:

Been looking at the datasheet for the TCRT5000L reflective optical sensor.  With 20mm through the diode it gives 1mA of collector current in the transistor which is more than enough.  Mind you, it does depend on the reflectivity of the surface and that's where experimenting is required.  I'm thinking of going for 10ma diode current giving around 0.5ma collector current.  The volt drop in the diode shows 1.1v so with 4 in series that's 4.4v.  If I run off 12v that leaves 7.6v for a series resistor = 750 ohms.  680 is the nearest preferred value.  For the detector transistor, I think I'll work on 0.25mA as a start.  If I run it from 3.3v, 12K should let it saturate at 0.4v VCE.  I have yet to look at the ESP32 datasheet to see what analogue voltage it takes but mostly this uses 3.3v so I assume that's the maximum.

Yep - that's correct though I've yet to destroy a pin yet  

10 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

I’m the same, went from DSLR to mono.  Funny I find NB easier, but I find LRGB is tricky! Unfortunately once the noise gets put in during processing it’s not easy to remove it at the end.  

I don’t use PI.  I literally scaled the RGB to match the Lum and added it in a few goes at 20% opacity.  Done in photoshop  

 

Thanks for the detail, Yeah - I'm not sure how I might do that in PI, sounds like it is something I might be able to do in pixelmath but the problem with PI is it is too scientific sometimes when really the ability to be more 'arty' (i.e. just move a slider till it looks right, rather than guess a number for a formula) would be easier (though there are some scripts which go some way towards this)  My Adobe subscription has run out a few weeks ago and I've not seen any discounts lately for it so might have to persevere trying to work it in PI till a discount turns up!  

3 hours ago, Gina said:

The ESP32 has arrived and it isn't all that big - just over 1" wide and 2" long (28mm x 50mm).  Now I'm waiting for the optical and Hall sensors.

I tend to use the Wemos D1 series of ESP8266 devices, I find them more reliable than the larger DIL one you've just bought (not sure why, but I have had to replace quite a few in that format plus when programming them having to press a button to do so is a bit of a pain), there's also a good range of dev boards for them to experiment with. Since my AAG one-wire station died, I've been running my weather station with them since 2016 though I do have a slight problem with memory erosion over time (I might have a round robin buffer average thingy thats doing too many writes over time somewhere in the code)

The original incarnation was stripboard with RTC, BME280 sensor and an UV sensor hooked up to Davis anemometer, wind direction and rain bucket.  This was housed in an enclosure made from white plastic plant saucers.

I eventually replaced the saucer version with a stevenson screen I build out of wood and plastic vent covers.

The strip board didn't last too long though - in June 2018, they finally succumbed to corrosion , I'd replaced the humidity sensor quite some time before that (thats the white thing hanging in the background).

I'm currently using a D1 mini-pro with external antenna socket though I haven't bothered to fit the external antenna as it has been fine so far. (about 70m down the garden)

The code has evolved over the years but basically the devices connects over wifi and syncs the RTC with NTP then runs a state machine with interrupts for rain and wind speed pulses. wind direction is analogue ADC input (it's a resistive sensor).  RTC & temp/humidity are I2C/1-wire. There's a watchdog on there to reboot if the device if the wifi is unobtainable etc. I did have a ftp, simple web page and syslog implemented but I've since dispensed of them - though I might put the webpage back on at some point if I get the motivation to do so....

Data uploads to wunderground and posts on twitter every couple of hours plus broadcasts MQTT data which I then use for other stuff in the house using NodeRed including a little weather display (also running on ESP8266) 

24 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Hi Jason

I really really like the smoothness and the detail of the first green image, but I do prefer the colours in the second one. Unfortunately it looks a lot noisier that the original version though.

I hope you dont mind I had a go bash at your data.  I made the first 'green' image mono, and used it as a luminance layer for the second image.

 

Adam

 

Yes, there's no treatment for noise in the latest image, I spent all my time on messing with the colours!  I've done a fair bit of processing of OSC (DSLR) but for some reason I'm struggling to make the leap of using that workflow adapted for mono shots! Feels like the sequence of workflow for mono and OSC are a bit reversed in the linear part of it in some tutorials and in others they align with that I am used to for OSC.... 

Did you use Pixinsight to mix in the new lum layer? I tried messing with adding a luminance layer in pixelmath but couldn't get it right

Got to Thank @carastro and @sloz1664 for giving me something to aim for in terms of what it might look like when done, though I still couldn't quite pull out the reddish dust in the lower left of the image like Carole did!

@x6gasYes, the first view of that jade image was quite something though I like the newer colour versions, I liked the jade one as you can see a Pelican in the image, it was a struggle to resist the urge to keep the Pelican whole vrs the colour - perfecting the image would for me show the Pelican's beak better and colour too... I am sure it's possible with some magic of blending images etc... 

Not sure how much more I can wring out of this.

Linear fit against SII then combined SHO, after which I have been playing with the curves all day, tweaked Saturation, Hue, A, B C components as well as the actual RGB & L channels. Had a play with some masks to try and target areas but couldn't quite get what I wanted just yet.

Overall image is rotated 180, flipped horizontally and then 90 deg clockwise to put the beak pointing downwards.  Final operation was to run the darkstructureenhance script which added a small amount of contrast to the pilar area

Ideally I'd like to preserve the Pelican beak detail as well as have the bright colours, suspect there might be some pixelmath in the future for this image to bring in something to show the beak... 

Carole & Steve - thanks guys it's good to see what good looks like so I can see where I can push the image to - I'll have a play again today with the data and see what I can pop out - I did continue messing with it last night but my bottle of wine got the better of me LOL 

8 hours ago, 5haan_A said:

Hi,

 

I would like to ask what does 2x2 binning do for you with this picture? I am aware of what binning is but have never been sure on how to apply it. It looks like you have applied it to great effect because it is a stunning picture, but I am just not sure how and why it helped. 

Best,

As I understand it, it means that with the 2x2, in a shorter time I have more data to work with due to the increased sensitivity though it is at a lower resolution, so compensating for the brightness of the target in the different filters. 

I may benefit from some more SII data perhaps.

Hmmm so a bit more playing and the Pelican seems to have gained weight! Not sure what happened to transpose the X/Y all I did was a crop then rotate 180, mirror horizontal and a rotate 90 clockwise! Anyhow running it through the script gives an option to remove some of the magenta in most (but not all) of the stars.

Aha - with a quick click of the unlink on STF we are in a more colourful area, just need to resolve the magenta stars!

4 hours ago, sloz1664 said:

Hi Jason,

Nice data capture and you have some detail there. However, how did you stack your images and what software did you use to process the final image. If you process as a SiiHaOiii image you should get more blues& golds in the image.

Steve

Detail is in the original post, Pixinsight is my tool of choice for calibration , alignment and stacking etc. 

 I loaded the 3 integrated NB filter images in to the SHO-AIP script. using the channel combination I am getting an error " source image dimension" on the SII file, though it seems OK on the script version. I was expecting more colour though... 

ETA: I aligned all the data against one good Ha Sub (1x1) so I was expecting the 2x2 sub integration to scale to that. If I channel combine SHO I get a very blue image so something isnt quite right! Welcome hints on where to look, error on the console is about the source dimension mentioned above, but when I look at all 3 main files they are all the same size as far as I can see (fits view) ???

Thanks Geof, Yeah - it's new territory for me too - I wasn't sure if the stars would be blown out. I think they are a bit on the OIII (some of them are square!) but it doesn't seem to translate through to the combined image from what I can see.... I also needed to do new darks for the 2x2 both light sub length and flat darks. Not too much of a problem but In my head when I built my dark library I wasn't expecting to do 2x2 so it's now in addition

I'm impressed with this 2x2 binning, first time using it - current work in progress but over the moon to see the initial result..

All processed in Pixinsight, this is just ABE after integration then combination using the SHO-AIP script with only the Ha, OIII, SII data and clicked the remove pink halos! .  No other processing so far other than a crop, rotate and flip so I could see the Pelican itself.  I might grab some more SII if I get the chance and see if that brings out anything further.

This is about 12 hours of data, though not sure if I should count the 2x2 as double time

36 Ha 600s 1x1 (Green)

23 OIII 600s 2x2 (Blue)

14 SII 600s 2x2 (Red)

ASI1600 & ZWO unmounted filters.

7 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

Still having problems virgin build on an 3b+ Buster. cloned site into home directory logged in as pi yet when i try and run 

service lighttpd force-reload
echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' | tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
 

get access denied

????

also when opening localhost.local get error 404

following the script from readme.md

 

do you guys execute these commands from

Most of this information came from https://www.dronkert.net/rpi/webcam.html
which is what this project is based upon.
 

 

You need admin privileges to start/stop services, try putting 'sudo' in front. I skipped the php test page I think when I did and just copied what I needed into /var/www/html

sudo service lighttpd force-reload

42 minutes ago, Gina said:

Good point.  Mind you no anemometer is going to read the true wind speed unless it's high up and well away from buildings or trees.  Few people will have a suitable place to erect a tall mast for the wind instruments.  There's a fight for my best location!!

There's a met office standard about the height of the equipment (10m I think) - mines on a scaffold pole and still suffers from some shelter in a couple of directions, less so in the winter due to tree foliage. 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/guides/10_0230_fs_17_observations.pdf

I think most anemometers use read switch pulses, my original AAG one did and it's replacement Davies one does to (though I am just using their instruments attached to my own Arduino ESP32), I almost went down the route of an ultrasonic based anemometer but it looked a bit too difficult to homebrew at the time and the Davis kit managed to swing the vote for it's easy of mounting. I coupled that with their rain bucket as well.

http://gillinstruments.com/products/anemometer/principleofoperation2.html

One word of experience is make sure you have a robust humidity sensor, the BME style sensors are not reliable overtime even in a screen box as they are not condensation resistant. I went for a solution based on a one-wire battery sensor IC and a more robust humidity sensor.

https://taaralabs.eu/1-wire-humidity-temperature-sensor/

36 minutes ago, Mognet said:

I have mine up and running, but pointing out of the spare room winow for now. Looks like the double glazing is giving a green cast to the light domes of London and Chelmsford

And not only can I see it's a clear night, but a near neighbour has left their bright bathroom light on. Again. 🤬

I've tinkered with the settings to give a 1600x1200 display so that the image is bigger on my tablet and phone. Need to fix the sunset time

I'll send up the bat signal from Chelmsford to see if you can see it in the camera LOL 

4 hours ago, wormix said:

Well pleased - connected up a temp sensor, copied over the standard HTML files and it’s all working!

Now need to see what happens with tonight’s video - I suspect it may be the file size issue that jiberjaber mentions a few pages back - the video stopped just after I went to bed last night and started when the sun started to come up so I’m guessing a primarily black image is coming up as a very small image. 

Yep, comment out the RM based on file size. It's in more than one place

2 hours ago, wormix said:

Think I’ve cracked it - needed to manually start a couple scripts to give it a kick and found a bit of temperature script that I hadn’t commented out that seems to have got the browser end working. 
 

now thinking about cameras - currently using a pi 1.3 camera as that’s what I had at home. Saw earlier in this thread that the V2 low light performance is significantly better.  Is it worth the upgrade?

Would the NOIR version be best suited for this project?
 

Also just found that you can get a pi zero camera (same sensor as the v1 camera) including a 160 degree lens for peanuts so if the low light performance is tolerable that could be a really cheap way of getting this project finished off  

 

Well this is last nights movie from a V2 noir camera, I have both cameras but I've only used the noir camera in this setup. I'd say the advantage of the V2 camera is it bins at lower resolutions. The NOIR doesn't seem to do much other than make colours look funny when you point it at trees etc  

Mine stopped taking new pictures around 04:25 this morning, no idea why.  I've rebooted and had the usual error.jpg so I've added the a line to rc.local to take a picture and create the webcam.jpg file on boot so will see if this manages to kick teh webcam back in to life post reboot... 

/usr/bin/raspistill -q 100 -ISO auto -awb greyworld -n -ex auto -w 800 -h 600 -o /run/shm/webcam.jpg
 

4 hours ago, wormix said:

Ok, so tinkered again and replaced the html Folder and now everything is working again

My Pi games seem to be a lot of hit and hope At the moment! 

That's good to hear, perhaps an inadvertent keypress when editing a file ?

If you are not running a sensor, make sure you've copied over the no sensor version of the html files as well

I thought I had replied but looks like it didnt post!

in /run/shm there should be 3 files

When you view the allsky page, it runs some php which takes the webcam.jpg and puts the banner text on it then saves that as buffer.jpg, they should be within a couple of mins of each other (make sure you have opened the allsky - camera link first before checking.

If you arn't getting something with a recent time & date on it then something else is an issue  

Are you getting an image in the /shm/run dir ? if you use "ls -ahl" you will be able to see the timestamp of the file etc

4 hours ago, wormix said:

Been playing around with the html and seem to have broken it - now not displaying an image, suspect I have to clear a cache somewhere. 

Theres a bit of html and a fair bit of php.  when you say no image, so you mean the error image or nothing at all?

You might consider a POE hat and injector then you don't need the additional power lead and power supply.  I had a go with it for my RPi4 on the scope mount but I prefer the 1gbps link and I think it was only 100mbps with the POE running. 

POE Hat:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07JPXR9ZN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Injector:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07D12D1QD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

No good for the PiZero of course as it's wifi only

1 hour ago, wormix said:

Evening al - I thought I would give this a try as I have a spare Pi Zero that’s been sitting around unused for the last couple years. 
 

I got to the Sunwait section and have stalled - the Make File bit is new to me. Is anyone able to explain that?

thanks

Gareth

Hi Gareth,  I don't remember having to compile Sunwait, it just worked for me iirc (it was a long time since I made the camera OS!)

ETA: Actually I must have done looking at it!  

Have you managed to clone the sunwait github? If so, you should have a dir called sunwait

from memory, if you change dir to the sunwait and then run 'make all' it should build