£200 Microlaptop with KStars software, control of scope and imaging, any ideas?

[{CP}-Brooker]

Hi All

Throwing this up more as a conversation piece than anything else.

Theres a new Ultra portable laptop called an Asus Eee which retails at £220 and comes in at just under a 1kg :shock: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/133848/asus-eee-pc-701.html.

I got one of these today, ostensibly to keep the missus happy and away from my PC. Amongst other things it comes preloaded with KStars planetarium. The settings are all there to control a scope such as a LX90 or celestron nexstar. Theres also no good reason it couldnt be used for driving a webcam. The memory is solid state so theres no noise and the battery life is great, plus its tiny so you wont be tripping over it. Strikes me as a great piece of kit to try out for this hobby.

Anyone got experience of using one of these to drive a scope? Where can I source a RS232 cable to connect to Kstars and my Nexstar 8SE?

Cheers

CP

[jgs001]

Cp,

Good luck with that. It seemed to me that the EEE would make a good and v portable device for this sort of application, although I was thinking of stellarium...

[Sam]

That's quite a neat little laptop. I might look at one for my eldest daughter. I wonder if it's grunty enough to run the webcam and record enough. The 4GB drive might be a bit limiting with only 1.5 GB left for storage.

[{CP}-Brooker]

Hi

Memory for file storage should nt be too much of an issue, the 4Gb is what it comes with but it has a SD card slot, I stuck a 2Gb card in and it was picked up straight away (its now going to be the MP3 player in the kitchen as well). A 2Gb card is about £15 and you can get 4 or 8Gb for not much more so disk space shouldn't be an issue.

The main issue may be that its currently running a Linux OS which may be fun to configure with the camera drivers ( I m pretty computer illiterate). On the web I ve seen people running Windows XP on it but I m a great fan of out of the box solutions .

Regards

CP

[Whippy]

I've been waiting for these and my first thought is that it doesn't run windows therefore it's doomed. However people less cynical/lazy than me will probably find a way of making this little cutie run all sorts of stuff. In the meantime it's restricted because how are you going to get any drivers for webcams/CCD's/anything on it?

Tony..

[Sam]

The Philips SPC900 has a linux driver and I'm sure others must as well. Good point about the storage CP.

[blinky]

I think Micro$oft have said they will attempt to get XP working on it, so this may be a ready built option soon....