Raspberry Pi3 for Astronomy

[bemo47]

Hi to all,

i have bought a Raspberry Pi3 which could be used in an observatory for some purposes like camera capture, skymap tool with carte du ciel or equivalent, goto system for a telescope (Atlas mount), etc...

I have installed Ubuntu Mate and then "cartes du ciel" but the result is dramatically slow. I am wondering how a Raspberry can manage this kind of software, if its possible, and how ?

First, I would like to know what you currently do with Raspberry in your observatory, which usage, which software, on which Linux, and how it work... If you could share some examples of usage in this post it would be grateful to understand up to where we can go.

Second, i want to test a video camera (ZWO ASI224MC) on my Pi3 with oacapture. I have installed the ARM Raspbian packet on my Ubuntu Mate, but it still doesn't work, msg :

oacapture: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
when i launch oacapture

Does anyone know why i have this ?

Third, i am using the Pi3 with a 23" IPS screen, resolution is 1920-1080 60hz, may be if i reduce the resolution it could improve the perf of the Pi3 ? If yes, how can i reduce the resolution ?

Thanks for your advices, as you can see i am not a Linux expert.....

Bernard

Edited April 6, 2016 by bemo47

[alexbb]

Hi and welcome,

Search on google for piastrohub. There's a topic on another forum for a project that was aimed initially for guiding only, but was later extended with more features.

Regards,

Alex

[riklaunim]

3. Resolution is native to the GPU (1080p@30Hz AFAIK is what you get) and is not related to CPU performance. As a whole RPi even at v3 isn't as good as ULV modern Intel or AMD CPUs   Plus it lacks some connectivity which may be a problem when you will want to record with ASI224 and do other things over USB or on the SD card.

[kens]

Have a look at INDI http://indilib.org/

You can't do everything on the RPi but it can do a lot of the work. You normally install EKOS on a faster machine and let the RPi control the mount and cameras.

The video tutorials at http://indilib.org/about/ekos/video-tutorials.html use a Rpi2

[MCinAZ]

On 04/06/2016 at 02:17, bemo47 said:

Second, i want to test a video camera (ZWO ASI224MC) on my Pi3 with oacapture. I have installed the ARM Raspbian packet on my Ubuntu Mate, but it still doesn't work, msg :

oacapture: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
when i launch oacapture

Does anyone know why i have this ?

Hi Bernard,

  I'm not using an RPi in my observatory, but have several for other purposes and good familiarity with Linux in general. The system may be running out of free memory when running Cartes du Ceil under Ubuntu. If so, virtual memory accesses will slow performance substantially as the operating system will continuously be swapping data between RAM and the micro SD card. You may do better to see if CdC can be compiled to run under Raspian since that distribution is better optimized for the relatively limited amount of RAM. Even under the best circumstances, CdC may be pushing the resources available in a Raspberry Pi.

  As for the issue with libudev, you should be able to address that using the following command:

  $ sudo apg-get install libudev1

  Installing libudev may get you only to the next missing library, but you can use a similar procedure to install other libraries as needed.

  -- Mike --

[bemo47]

Thanks to all for your answers,

In fact, i succeeded to install oacapture and all the related libraries and it works fine except that the captured frame rate stays low, 4 to 5 ims/sec with highest resolution, and up to 20 ims/sec with 800x600. But it works.

Regarding Carte du Ciel, or Stellarium which has the same performance issue, do you know if there could be another soft able to be used as a GoTo for an EQ6 mount ? The ieda is to be able to see the sky and objects on a creen with this soft and the Pi, and then pilot the mount with the Pi. I have seen a solution on piastrohub, i think, using skysafari on a tablet or phone, linkedt to the Pi which then pilot the mount. Its strange to me that a phone could be able to host such software like skysafari, and the Pi could not be able, may be the lack of memory.... May be we should be able to run android on the pi ?