teoria_del_big_bang

Looks like others also regret using PLA 🤣

Steve

On 20/08/2021 at 11:49, jiberjaber said:

I find PTEG tricky to be consistent on printing however I don't have the same issue with ABS which is supposed to be more tricky to get consistent! 

I have just the opposite, I can print PETG easier if anything than PLA but my ABS prints always warp from the print surface, probably some glue or similar would cure that but as I can Print PETG easily I see no reason for ABS.
Maybe some printers work better with ABS than others ?

I think with both PETG and ABS the print parameters really have a big influence over the finished print, I find PLA very forgiving and so long as the nozzle temperature is within a decent range of the melting point then most other parameters can have a pretty wide range of settings and still prints okay.
With ABS and PETG the cooling settings certainly have a huge affect, also other parameters a small change can change the finish quality quite a lot.
Sounds like you have the ABS settings tuned in just right 🙂 

Steve

On 13/08/2021 at 13:44, AbsolutelyN said:

Yes I never thought my Ender 3 would print ABS but I do wonder if PETG might be an option. 

I would stay clear of ABS, that often warps on the bed as you print it, PETG is pretty easy to print with and sticks really well to print surface so you should be okay.
I am not sure what temperature PETG will start to warp at though, the melting point is higher than PLA but not by much but that is not necessarily indictive of when it will start to warp.
All in all PETG is a much better, and stronger, material to be printing anything for outdoors.

I use a lot of THIS it is a good price, next day delivery and I find it prints very well.
I have bought a load of this lately as there was 30% off a couple of weeks ago on Amazon so was under £13 for 1Kg.
Just checked now and theres 40% discount so around £11 now, an absolute bargain.

Personally I never leave my scope itself out on hot days under cover. I often cover the mount (although probably not necessary, but have my whole setup so I can remove one power cable and one USB cable and then slide the whole lot off on the dovetail.

Steve

3 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

I dont think what I'm suggesting is any different to the equivalent ZWO camera?

Is that what those holes are designed for then on the ZWO ?

I guess no different then.

Steve

Are you bench testing with a rig like shown on THIS video ?

4 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

The little empty holes (x2) either side of the starhead screw are threaded.  I could buy some grub screws and use that to adjust the tilt?

Maybe, but the adjustment will probably be quite coarse and would there be a danger of stray light getting in ??

No idea then I just looked again at the QHY website  and they still say the CAA (I assume means Camera Angle Adjuster) adds a further 6 mm to BF so cannot be as that picture (Can it ????)

Are you suffering tilt then ?

On the mono version it is not a tilt correction plate, only on the colour version.

That is my understanding anyway, and no idea why the colour version should have it and the mono not apart from the tilt plate is thicker and probably would mean as it is further from the FW you would not get away with using 36mm filters and need the 2" ones and QHY wanted to be able to claim it would be okay with the 26mm filters.

Thats my best guess anyway - I could be wrong (I often am - certainly according to my wife and kids 🙂 )

Steve

Just now, Sunshine said:

Just a wonderful image, really!

absolutely agree 😀

steve

I started a link along the same lines as this and ended up buying one of THESE off Ebay, I paid around £25 so worth looking about but they work a treat.

Steve

24 minutes ago, RadekK said:

Do your wifi dongle comes with binary drivers? If so, it could be the case that the drivers are compiled for a specific kernel version. That would be dead end if you cannot recompile them for a new kernel.

You can try using open source drivers instead and forget vendor provided binaries. You need to identify your hardware (run: lsusb -v). Then try to find your device on a compatibility list like this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported or this https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi

 

 

Thanksfor the reply, I have no idea what type of driver I just normally download it with the following command:

sh -c 'wget deb.trendtechcn.com/install -O /tmp/install && sh /tmp/install'

And if any errors occur do the following then try again:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

But so you are aware I only had the issue with the latest StellarMate download, the Astroberry latest worked fine and so I am using your Astroberry and works fine so not really gone into it any further since I got this to work and abandoned StellarMate.

Steve

What a great image. 🙂 

Yes I had a surprise when I took the dog out at 10PM and looked up so the walk was cut short and gear out, but around midnight the cloud cover came very quickly didn't it.

Steve

9 minutes ago, banjaxed said:

Just set your gear up to cool down and by the time you go out to start your session it WILL be cloudy 🙄

Yes been there many times this year, but if I say my glass is half full instead of half empty - it does mean I can now set up my gear in record time 🤣🤣🤣
 

Steve

2 minutes ago, Padraic M said:

There's still hope - plenty of time for the forecast to change to green!

btw did you get all of your kit sorted out in time for your trip to dark skies?

Yes I must admit there is usually little point looking at it so far ahead.
And yes my gear is all up and running again as of last night.
I actually did have a third thing go wrong as when I either fixed or replaced all the damaged bits of kit I updated the RPi running StellarMate and it crashed and lost everything on the SSD (not images as these are all backed up) but had to reload the RPi and that didn't go straightforward but eventually remembered what to set up.
So all was sort of ready to go as of yesterday early evening but wondered when I would get any clear skies to test it and I just took the dog out around 10PM before retiring to bed and low and behold, stars everywhere, some thin misty cloud but good enough to get the focusser tested, and set focus on the guidescope and just generally give it a test drive which went well before midnight when the clouds really rolled in and put a stop to any actual imaging.

Only thing I am still waiting for is the new USB electronics for my rotator but I can manually rotate it with the hand set so I can live with that.

But it all works so that is good news 🙂 

So some clear nights around Battle would be good next week - I live in hope 🙂 

Steve

Yes well actually knowing my luck it may well be true as I am on holiday in a cottage in the the middle of nowhere near south coast next week and planned to take my gear with me and this is the forecast for there , Typical.

Steve

New Moon + no clouds - just doesn't happen up north.

Steve

22 minutes ago, JamesF said:

The observatory machine isn't powered up at the moment, but I think I have mine set to something like "Flip if HA > 0.2 hours", so it should flip after the first sub or two once the target as crossed the meridian (depending on my sub lengths).

James

Yes that makes sense to me now, I am sure mine was 0.15 hours, I just couldn't remember what logic I used to set it and whether I did it in degrees or hours, but that sort of brings it back as I think mine was the same sort of logic behind it assuming subs would be on average between 5 and 20 mins.

Steve

Having ad a total crash on my RPi I have had to reload EKOS all over and for the life of me I cannot remember what I set this to. I know I did not have it at zero to get it to work flawlessly but wondered what other members have set this to.
My mount is an I_Optron CEM60.

Steve

You should not need a router in the field but create a hotspot on the NUC (I assume you can do this as I can with the RPi) then connect to that hotspot with the laptop or tablet.

Another solution is to buy a 100M flat Ethernet cable and connect through that. Yes its another cable and WiFi would be better but it is cheap, and I say the flat cable as these tend to be lighter and go through very narrow gaps like a car window that is practically shut and the great advantage is they are very reliable and fast transfer of data to laptop.

Steve

11 hours ago, autonm said:

Questions

How do I power the laptop from the Battery box? do I need a convertor such as this  .... how do I know if I need 300w or 500w?
Personally I shy away from inverters, they are pretty inefficient boosing 12V up to 240VAC then plugging a power supply in to then convert the 240VAC to 19V DC.
Now I have no experience of THESE but they get some decent reviews on Amazon (for what that is worth) and would seem a better option of I were to go that way.
Also if you do eventually get a NUC, RPi or Windows stick that runs somehow from the 12V supply actually on the mount then you can remote desktop, Teamviewer etc to it from your laptop at a distance and maybe even sit in the car with the laptop and then use the 12V supply in the car with this (just a thought).

As the Battery Box only has 1 x 12v output, can I split this - using one of these ... one would have the convertor (above) running out of it - and the other the Pegasus Power Box 12v DC adapter.
Yes that would work but I would be wary that it may give poor connection as it rocks about with two cables dangling from it.
To be honest in my opinion I hate those cigarette socket type connectors anyway and wonder why the hell so many Astro bits of kit use them, the sockets were never really designed for constant use and make reliable connections, so I try never to use them anyway and replace any with other reliable connectors.
If going the multiple socket route I would prefer one of THESE If you search you can get then with 3 or even 4 sockets.
A better solution is to add your own secondary (or more) connectors to the box is there is room, quite easily using THESE

My future hope is to drop the laptop and replace it with a 'windows on a stick' type of setup. Certainly the way to go for remote imaging.

... am I missing anything? or is there a UK based Battery Box - with 2 x 12v DC sockets?  I don't think so, hence my suggestion of adding your own. If you can solder, or know somebody who can do it for you, I suggest cutting off all your cigarette type connectors and replace with THESE to give much more reliable connections that will not pull out when you catch then with your feet in the dark.

As I said I think powering a laptop in the field is the difficult one, they run at a strange voltage and are power hungry, and to top it all most are pretty poor on battery life after a few months of use.
To be honest I haven't had the need to do so as I run my rig from an RPi that can run through a converter from the 12V, a NUC or similar running direct of 12V is even better option.
Yes I still need my laptop to set everything going but once imaging I can put it to sleep and just wake it up every so often to check how things are going, so battery life is pretty good and can see me through a night.
Also I must add my nights of remote imaging so far are few and far between so although I have prepared for it most sessions have been from my patio running off mains, although I have built a 12V supply and have tested it out a couple of times successfully but most times due to the few clear nights this year have not risked it and run everything of 240V supplies.

One other thought when you change to some sort of small computer at the mount is to ditch the laptop to communicate with the computer and use your phone or a tablet that is less power hungry and will last a night on battery and if not easy to charge from 12v with the right adapter.
All depends on what program you are running on the computer I guess and if you can use an App to talk to it. I tend not to go that direction as my eyes are not great and would struggle to see such small screen.

Steve

There are various options, I will have a think and get back to you later today, I am sure many others will also offer advice as there are several threads all about the same difficult issue on SGL from earlier this year.
Steve

I can only agree with all advice above.
I now use EKOS but used APT for quite a while and once set up you can leave the rig imaging away and go to bed if you want, it will handle the flip and get back on target with ease, without any intervention.

I also found it better to set the flip for a little past the meridian as I think all mounts will handle going past meridian by some way. I think I did a search on google for APT meridian settings and just copied them and it worked.
Best to witness the first one or two flips just to make sure, I usually just select a target almost at the meridian at start of a session and give it a test so I do not have to wait up till 3:00 in morning. Once I have seen it work okay a couple of times I feel confident to let it do it unattended.

As it gets to the set flip point APT will assess if the exposure length is such that it will take it past the flip point and if it would it will  platesolve its current position, flip, then take a test shot and platesolve again to get back to target (although target image is now flipped) and then carry on imaging.
If you want to re-focus I believe APT can also do this as certain specified intervals, or temperature changes, not sure whether you can specify after the flip or not, its been a while since i used APT.

Steve
 

I just downloaded the current version of Astroberry and that allows me to install the dongle just fine, so not sure why StellarMate would not but all seemed to point to missing Kernel headers.

I am not really so up on Kernels and such but when I type the command uname -a it returns 5.4.51 -V7L+ when I first boot up Astroberry and after a full-upgrade this then returns 5.10.52 V7L+, but Stellarmate returned 5.10.17 V7L+.
What all that means I am not sure but the different Kernels seems to be what was preventing me getting the driver for the dongle to load.

Maybe @RadekK can offer some thoughts ?

Yes that is one of my other options. I do actually have a fanless small computer already loaded up with Ubuntu and KStars that I haven't used for a while.

It is just that the RPI4 has done everything I wanted, was very small and I had 3D printed a nice base that connected to my tripod.
But worth resurrecting it and at least seeing if I can use the dongle with it.

Steve