Painless remote control options

[Ajohn]

Probably the obvious way taking power from the plugs at each end.

anyway

http://www.corning.com/opcomm/OpticalCablesbyCorning/products/USB-3.Optical.aspx

 Horses mouth - they make them.

Semiconductor manufacturers are also producing truly tiny signal conditioning chips, much like the normal USB cable length booster components only a lot smaller. In the case of USB 3 I would guess they are essential at much shorter cable lengths.  I keep looking for a USB 3 sata hub plus card reader.  Seems to be thin on the ground. I'd guess cable length is why. Dongles =  no leads,  those are around.

John

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[JamesF]

Probably the obvious way taking power from the plugs at each end.

anyway

http://www.corning.com/opcomm/OpticalCablesbyCorning/products/USB-3.Optical.aspx

 Horses mouth - they make them.

Aha!  It looks like they're using fibre for the signal and copper for a power connection all in one "cable".  The copper presumably carries sufficient power for the electronics at the far end, but not enough to power parasitic devices.  Without that I could see it negotiating with a hub to get power, but it would still be a problem with self-powered devices because they wouldn't be able to power it.  And in fact if all it does is translate a data signal from electrons to photons and back (rather than looking like a pair of USB hubs connected back-to-back by fibre optic) then it has no way to negotiate for power in the first place.

James

[Ajohn]

 I didn't really look but did wonder about that way of doing it. I also suspect USB can cope with power at both ends. Might be wrong about that but I did have a machine where one USB hub turned off at times - no power on it - and could only get it back up by repowering the machine.

On Linux. I just loaded Kubunto into an HP Mini 200-400 netbook that did have Win 7 on it. 1.6GHZ processor and 1gb of ram. I ran it without installing initially from a DVD. Not really enough memory for that but it tried and was semi functional without any crashes. Pity they don't offer the choice of nicking a bit of disk space. I then hit the install button. Had a surprise here. It gave me 2 choices really. Use up the entire disc or set partitions manually - no help which I suspect some would need and no apparent way of leaving the machine in a state where it would dual boot. Sort of all or nothing approach - sad. I'd guess there is info on the web on how to get round that. To just try it on a machine like this one it might be worth loading it into a USB stick but really more memory is needed.

Having installed it boot up is slow but the desktop is usable as soon as it comes up. Application loading is also slow but functions well once it's up. I'd say overall quicker than the Win 7 that was on it. Much snappier once an application is showing. Can't expect to run huge apps really but from experience swapping isn't usually that bad as the core parts of Linux can remain in memory.

I then for my own interest looked at software installation. Kubuntu/Ubuntu do have a graphical interface for this. I tried a search for Kstars - not there, then a package called Arduino, provides another way of programming them - not there. I then tried some topic searches such as dev and compiler and gcc - no good. I'm comparing with YAST ( Yet Another System Tool ) in OpenSuse. That is way way better. One of the problems with open source is knowing what is about and what does what. A simple search for AVR would bring up all related packages in that. Kstars - well it's under the educational section. More importantly when compiling source the header files for any library file that the applications uses are needed. Easily found in YAST. Ok Ubuntu/Kubuntu can use apt-get and there are loads of packages that can be obtained that way but I firmly believe that these days there really shouldn't be any need to work at that level in a console at all / maybe occasionally. Some people do love it though.

So for me while I might install a pre built Ubuntu for a server etc no way would I use it as a main work machine. The other difference is install. OpenSuse comes with over 4gb on the dvd. Ubuntu 1.1. Many of the things I need are on the OpenSuse distribution. Not sure if they will offer a dual boot install,  This may have disappeared on all of them due to the availability of VM's.

I'll post a useful link on Arduino programming. I fancy an electronic focuser similar to the one shown on the INDI pages but also with the opportunity to use it manually locally.

https://www.cypherpunk.at/2014/09/native-assembler-programming-on-arduino/

The code posted shows a cardinal sin where I come from - only one of the interrupt vectors specified (reset) which means it will crash if one happens to pop up for some reason. Tedious filling all in but can be used again on any subsequent applications.

 I was dismayed when I saw the method of using GCC on Atmel's pages.  There is no way I would write code like that. My way is what is shown in the link - pure native assembler. Much depends on what is wanted and there are plenty of links off that page at various depths that go through several ways of doing it even mixed with C or C++.

John

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[JamesF]

On Linux. I just loaded Kubunto into an HP Mini 200-400 netbook that did have Win 7 on it. 1.6GHZ processor and 1gb of ram. I ran it without installing initially from a DVD. Not really enough memory for that but it tried and was semi functional without any crashes. Pity they don't offer the choice of nicking a bit of disk space. I then hit the install button. Had a surprise here. It gave me 2 choices really. Use up the entire disc or set partitions manually - no help which I suspect some would need and no apparent way of leaving the machine in a state where it would dual boot. Sort of all or nothing approach - sad. I'd guess there is info on the web on how to get round that. To just try it on a machine like this one it might be worth loading it into a USB stick but really more memory is needed.

I'm sure that on recent installs of Ubuntu and Mint that I've done (at last in the last few years), when it finds another OS already installed it offers the option to use the entire disk or to split the disk between them and dual-boot or to do something manually.

I've just installed Mint 17 with Xfce on an Acer Aspire One.  It was a bit sluggish before, but I found a small SSD and replaced the original hard disk with that.  It seems to have made quite a difference to performance.

I'm not a particular fan of the Ubuntu-style package management.  It does seem to make stuff hard to find, particularly when you're looking for the development files to go with a library and the names don't match up in an entirely predictable way.

I use a Linux machine as my main work system and I pretty much always work from the command line.  Often I might have a dozen terminal windows open at the same time.  For me it's just much faster, and often I'm working on a server in a datacentre somewhere else in Europe or the USA or occasionally even somewhere like Australia, where a GUI just isn't a sane way to work.  It probably is a dying practice though.

James

[Gina]

I ran OpenSuse for a while and I did like YAST   But I went on to entirely free distros and was at the launch of Ubuntu.  I stayed with that for a number of years but when they forked off in a direction I didn't like and Mint was launched to continue in the direction Ubuntu had been going, I transferred my allegiance to that.  I already had a good understanding of using the command line from many years of DOS and various other operating systems, before and since.  I have to say though that I found Ubuntu and its derivatives pretty simple to learn and to use the graphical interface.

Once I get shot of various things that are grabbing my remaining brain power, I'm hoping and expecting to get back to Linux for as much as possible.  I'm totally fed up with having to reboot Windoze to get back any sort of speed   And Mac OSX isn't perfect either!

[Ajohn]

Yeh - I have used a number of shells over the years. Old hat really so I don't unless I need to. I even have been known to use the root desktop. They covered that with images of bombs once and severly crippled it on KDE. I moaned on the mailing list and the following release was as it should be. After all root should know what not to do. I've not had the need of late so no idea what it looks like now.

I was pretty fed up with windows and while walking around PC World noticed a nice thick big box with Suse on it. It even had 2 thick books in it. Bought it and over the next say 6 months stopped using windows at all. I later bought at least one upgrade from the same source and then found I couldn't so downloaded OpenSuse which is free.

I have to upgrade now - can't load the arduino package thanks to dependencies. It's not much of a problem really except that I still run Kmail from KDE 3. I think that option is still available for OpenSuse 13.2 by searching for kdepim3 on their build service.  Just checked and it is. Nothing compares with the old Kmail.

Being able to run KDE on that netbook surprised me. I did find some figures showing % ram and cpu usage of all of the desktops. There ain't much difference according to that so I thought I would try it. I feel it's more usable than win 7 and might be fine if I fitted more ram.  Next thing will be to install OpenSuse 13.2 on it and have a look around. They have being having problems getting people to maintain YAST but I think it now uses the new console mechanism. They have added a nice feature there - type a command and instead of just throwing an error if it isn't there the suggest running cnf what ever it is, command not found. That searches the repo's and generates a copy paste line to install it.

To be honest I suspect OpenSuse still wins out over others because it's widely used on servers. Even HP qualify their stuff on it. Debian is an alternative but installing that isn't easy especially for beginners. OpenSuse is graphical in a similar way to Ubuntu which makes that aspect easy. Given the choice I would run ARCH but I can't spend the time needed to learn to install it - more of a will to really. I have a PC so that I can use it and that's that really. When I install it on my main machine I hope it still offers import partitioning but will have to make notes just in case. Odd system writes are directed to a small partition on one of the discs. I run an SSD but nothing ever writes to it unless I add or update software. My home is on raid, swap never used but on another disc and one other I use as a sort of back up at times. It seems the install will just update now but I'm not sure if I should trust it. I'll see what the forum thinks about that. There are several very helpful people on it.

Out of interest this is the easy to use part of the build service. Many distro's use it in other areas. It's where updates come from when packages move on from the original release long before the normal update service offers them - if they ever do, I use several that aren't included in the distro anyway.

http://software.opensuse.org/package/kdepim3

John

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[JamesF]

I'd guess that most of the server userbase is actually split between RedHat/CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu with all the others trailing quite some distance behind.  By far the largest number of Linux-based servers I get asked to work on are running either RedHat or CentOS (the "free" release of RedHat, basically).  Debian is probably next and then Ubuntu.  It's rare to be asked to touch anything else.  Same with most job ads I've seen.

What works in the server marketplace doesn't necessarily apply where the desktop (or laptop) is concerned though.  I wouldn't personally choose to run RedHat or CentOS on my desktop although I'd quite happily use (and generally prefer) them for servers.  I'd guess there's far more parity between a larger number of different distributions on the desktop.

James

[Ajohn]

  Maybe they can't afford HP servers.

The install on the netbook went ok. It seemed to get a little confused because Linux was already on it. Had to hit a create partitions button. Previously it's always proposed one. Boot may be a bit slower than Ubuntu but the install dvd was still in so it looked at that twice. The install DVD offers several options including boot from hard disc, a safe mode and memory tests. It might also be a touch slower in all respects but it's 64bit and I loaded 32bit Kubuntu. I feel OpenSuse still has an advantage in that area. It will load all of the 32bit libs as well as 64.  Probably not so important now but some useful old app might need the 32bit stuff. It's currently doing a mass of security updates. That will take some time as 13.2 has been out for a while now.

John

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[Ajohn]

I think I have concluded that this option is the most painless or will be in the near future

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iastrohub/

There is a link to a cloudynights thread with lots of discussion on it. Why will be ? Currently it's built round a TV dongle. The problem with that is that they are likely to change periodically for all sorts of reasons - different hardware in them for instance. This could mean that people may buy one expecting it to work and finding out that it wont. Anat the author is very helpful with this aspect but is now looking at it running on a 'pi which as a platform should be a lot more stable. The Odroid is another possibility but they produce new products more often but I suspect if they wish to succeed they too will have to offer backward compatability and a stable platform.

One of the advantages I feel this set up has is that it just downloads jpg's  from the camera, That should speed things up a lot even with limited bandwidth. These days cameras usually put 9 stops into jog's often with settings that will add even more. I feel that is sufficient to judge a shot and helps a lot in the area of needing watty pc's around at all. Ideal for a portable set up.

John

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[knro]

I think I have concluded that this option is the most painless or will be in the near future

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iastrohub/

There is a link to a cloudynights thread with lots of discussion on it. Why will be ? Currently it's built round a TV dongle. The problem with that is that they are likely to change periodically for all sorts of reasons - different hardware in them for instance. This could mean that people may buy one expecting it to work and finding out that it wont. Anat the author is very helpful with this aspect but is now looking at it running on a 'pi which as a platform should be a lot more stable. The Odroid is another possibility but they produce new products more often but I suspect if they wish to succeed they too will have to offer backward compatability and a stable platform.

One of the advantages I feel this set up has is that it just downloads jpg's  from the camera, That should speed things up a lot even with limited bandwidth. These days cameras usually put 9 stops into jog's often with settings that will add even more. I feel that is sufficient to judge a shot and helps a lot in the area of needing watty pc's around at all. Ideal for a portable set up.

John

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I didn't realize remote control was that painful! I actually just wrote a tutorial and named it Painless remote control with Ekos & INDI. I hope you find it useful!

[Ajohn]

 That's great Nebula - One of the reason I started this thread was that it might produce more information in one place - in this thread. I hoped for more links actually.

Where I said looks like least painful I should have added for me as I want a completely portable set up as round here I will take some excellent light pollution shots. The set up I linked to uses a web interface which means that many things can be used to drive it that also have long battery life.  It also looks like the 'pi B's may be able to handle a sensible amount of USB current load. Times on a model B don't look too bad but I am not sure which one has been used. It's  also not clear what the astrometry.net software is using to do it's sums - multiple cores or would the FPU and one be better etc. Makes me wish I had done work on what is essentially PC software but I have only worked on automotive ECU's generally in native assembler and some very boring after a while application software a long time ago pre windows.

I'm also starting to try out an INDI set up using a netbook for Kstars / Ekos but I'll bet I will need to ask a question about the feasibility of just downloading jpg's from the camera. If you have read all of the posts you might have noticed that I am concerned about getting a decent bandwidth on the connection. That shouldn't be needed if raw remains in the camera. Wifi here is Rubbish. There is too much on it and it doesn't go very far either.

I haven't stuck Kstars on the netbook yet. I aught to know what should go on an Atom processor but installed 64bit OpenSuse and then 32bit. The 32bit (legacy) seems to be noticeably quicker. Also that OpenSuse may be a touch quicker than Kubuntu. It's a lot quicker than windoze 7 to the point where an application is actually usable and the system type applications and browsing run with some snap once they are loaded. It just has 1GB of ram as so far I have failed to get the cover off the thing. KDE on 13.2 seems fine though, not even bitching about too much work to do on the graphics - it probably will at some point.  Unfortunately it uses a 19.5v supply.  That's rated at 40w. Some one on the INDI forum commented that they do use this sort of set up but that it is slow.

What ever I do will take some time as I am starting from scratch. Even a new mount. I just like to have a good idea what I will do before I get round to doing it. At the moment I suspect INDI will be a fall back for if the other way doesn't work out.

John

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[Stanku]

Did you try the software? For example, this one https://www.eltima.com/products/usb-over-ip-linux/ 

I use it with all Linux based and Windows machines - all the devices become networking with it :)))

This app is also compatible with Mac, but I don't have one)