skybadger

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/625568-ascomdslr-ascom-driver-for-dslr-camers-canon-nikon/?fromsearch=1 HTh

Checkout cloudy nights for a similar thread, you should find a link there. Be aware that you still need byn to operate the camera, for a Nikon at least. Mike

Hi Dave When does the starvis kick in ? Isn't that the point of using a Sony ixm91. M

Take an existing one and paint it in layers of latex ?

Cheers, that's another data point.

Thanks Dave That's really handy. It's hard finding a 5 or 8mp camera on there with starves though..

Ooh, where can I get a 5mp starves from, for that price ?. Sounds like you are the man in the know..

On my obbo PC. which is a vanilla 2nd hand dell running w10, the nic natively supports wake on lan. It's set as an option on driver settings. That's not to say you don't need a client on top of that too... I prefer to keep it running in sleep/low power just to keep it warm and dry.

With plate solving and self-correction to pointing assumed ?

Thanks Martin.

Hi Steve. Is the wake on lan thing down to your mic not supporting it ?. I'm surprised at that if it's a recent PC. Also, if you are logged in to a remote session, why do you need a script to shut the PC down ? I set mine to low power mode after 20mins and run from an ssd. It's as if it was never off.. Mike

Yes, but were you solving after a slew or had you shimmed it to get to a blind slew so reliable it picked up straight after ?

As an owner of an eq8, I finally got around to enabling the auto meridian flip under eq pro last night and got good Dec registration but about 20' difference in RA. How well does yours do and have you shimmed it ? Cheers Mike

Thanks for that. I have an Alexa and have created a script in node-red , just looking for shared experiences there.

Thanks for that. Interested in your approach to setting up Alexa ?

As would I,just for the skies of course.

And what would your price point be ? You can buy pulsar after-market dome drives to do this. £750? How easily does your dome revolve ? Can you measure it ? I can t think of a kit that is cheap enough in brand new parts. Even using scrap parts, you still need new motor control parts , brackets, housing and software. What about a print-yourself kit?

I thought we'd done as a community that via the belting and pulley solution.. What more do you need? There are ascom drivers for those solutions in open source.

Or the onstep system or a instep board, or a little-foot... The steppers on the mt1 are up to the job, you need to put 18 or 24 volts across them with ballast and current control to get better speeds out of them. The Heq5 are the closest to a drop in. I did the goto4all MOD from etx motors onto an old Sx mount, followed by building an SS2K control onto a larger vintage mount. Working on assembling a instep for my horseshoe mount now.

I'm interested. Shame about dogs though. What's the camping like in March, temperature wise and is everyone taking tents or caravans ? Cheers Mike

Any tracking graphs ? Or have you tried rebalancing it yet ? Looking at the video and seeing the lack of tracking I would guess at worm engagement problems shown up by imbalance. Can you manually steer it past that point with the clutch disengaged ? Are the cables limiting the slew or becoming taught?. Tie them up so they don't drag and ensure their length. I can't tell from the picture. Sometimes the handset cable gets wrapped tight around the head after a slew from east to west and this will stop it in its tracks. RE-route the handset cable and power cable to join the other cable bundle over the top of the mount. Are the clutches too loose ? Bow easily does it move when they are engaged ?

I have 5 or more ftdi and one pl serial adaptors. No problems with either.. I did blow up a pl adapter by reverse connecting 12v. Quite dramatic.

I didn't mean to be critical, I just wanted to point out an alternative. By point 1 I am assuming that whatever you build in Arduino or serial land is IP enabled and is the interface to the sensors. That is the thing that you can put your sensor logic in and use to drive ascom via the REST interface. Mike

Two things, you don't need the sensor driver, you could call ascom directly from your sensor controller using the ascom rest api. I'm using node red to run a workflow that is called by Alexa, it receives data from sensors and can issue REST calls into Ascom to open and close the dome etc. Second, average is easy and not that intensive, you just need to add the data as the buffer fills and then manage adding and deleting once full.

Thanks for your efforts. I think it's a great idea. Can you register them withe ascom team betas available for download ? On the one hand I do have maxim, but s overblown to run a DSLR. On the other, there is backyard eos, which is cheaper but not free. Now there is scripting + ascom. Would you mind clarifying whether you specify the shutter start and end times to the millisecond? That would be really useful for satellite and meteor photography. .