Gina's DIY All Sky Camera - Mark 4 - with ZWO ASI185MC

[ChrisLX200]

OK, got it - the cold side is the opposite to that with the power cables attached  

I was impressed with the performance of the ASI178, it's the best of these small cameras that I have. My 1.8mm lens has not turned up yet, hopefully by Wednesday.

ChrisH

[Gina]

Good - to both

Have now printed the ring to hold the dome and glued it to the box.  Dome is a good fit and unlikely to come off but I think I'll probably use some plastic clips to hold it on.  I changed the design of the focussing gears to clear the dome ring.  9t pinion and 47t spur gear with mod 1.5 size teeth.

Next stage is to make holes for the cables in the box bottom plate and sort out the electronics.  I shall use the Arduino Nano I used before for focussing until I sort out the RPi.  So I shall want 12v for the stepper motor and 2 USB cables - one for the camera and one for the Nano.

[Gina]

Hole drilled and cables connected.  Nano was working at first but when I tried to run my focuser control app it wouldn't connect.  Now the Arduino IDE won't recognise it either.  Looks like I might be running without dome again and focussing by hand tonight if the forecast clear skies materialise.  At least it will have ambient cooling though so the noise might be less.

[Gina]

I'm getting rather fed up with the failing Nano syndrome I have to say!!   Where I want remote control I think I'll look at other options.  Once the sketch is uploaded to the AVR, I would prefer NOT to use USB for control.  I thinking of going over to bare AVR chips and something other than USB for control.  OF course, as I said before, I plan to use the RPi but have to find out how to program it.

[hughgilhespie]

Hi Gina,

You certainly do have a way with Nano boards!! Have you thought about switching to Teensy 3.2? They are Nano sized, but vastly more powerful, using a 32 bit ARM Cortex M4 processor running at 72 MHz. You still program them using the Arduino IDE so they are simple to use. The main downside is that that are 3.3 Volt devices but almost all the pins are 5 volt tolerant so interfacing isn't too much of a problem. A particularly nice feature - for me anyway - is that all the GPIO pins have full interrupt capability, not just 2 as on the Nano.

Some of the GPIO pins are not really usable as they are only accesssible via solder pads on the underside of the board, but there are still 24 GPIO pins useable.

I am planning on using a Teensy board for my next stepper driver. It will allow me to use AccelStepper with a much higher pulse rate that a Nano - the Nano is limited to about 4 kHz whereas the GECKO G251X driver I use can accept up to 250kHz.

Regards, Hugh

 

[Gina]

Thank you Hugh   I'll take a look at those.

[Gina]

Now have the ASC in the new box and mounted on the mast with the masthead adapter.  I printed a hook for this mast to the guttering like I did with the smaller test mast.  No dome and focussed by hand.  I'm looking into using the RPi 3 B board and have given up on the Nano.

Stars and Milky Way are showing now with a 20s exposure.  Orientation is north to the left.

[Gina]

Still some daylight showing to the west but dark enough to increase the auto-exposure to 60s.  Have started video recording.  I can't see any hot pixels now so the improved thermal conductivity from camera to environment is working well.

[Gina]

Getting dark now.  The orange glow just west of south is the town of Honiton about 5 miles away.

[Gina]

I haven't seen any sign of the Persieds in my videos - maybe 60s is to long exposure.  Might stand more chance when I get the ASI178MM camera and can use shorter exposures.

[ChrisLX200]

I caught just one so far, but the radiant is not well up yet and better display will probably be in the early hours... I'm using 20sec exposures on the 178 and colour GPCAM2 at the moment, the gain setting on the 178 is only 200 though, on the GPCAM2 it is 300. I don't really know what those numbers mean!

ChrisH

 

[gentlebear76]

I looking forward to hear about your experiences with the ASI178. I have some wild ideas about how I can use my QHY, but it might be a bit too wild. I might just be one of those things not worth using a lot of time on and just take the plunge and pay the price. It also seems it should be compatible with the indilib and thus runnable on Linux.

/Michael

[Gina]

Some clear sky tonight so have put the ASC outside again (been out until just now at the theatre ).

[gentlebear76]

Hi,

You may already know this but I thought I'd share anyway :-) ZWO has an SDK for their cameras which enables you to do the imaging using a simple program. The SDK can be found here: http://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software/ 

This guy: http://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera have used it for his all sky camera, running it on a raspberry pi under raspbian. I'm sooooo tempted right now :-D

/Michael

[ChrisLX200]

I used my 178MM for a 5hr run on the 8th, not trying to go deep as I was just after meteors so 20sec exposures with a gain of just 200.

 

ChrisH

 

edit: and YouTube seem to have broken the vid as it sticks early on - just jump over the sticky point!

[Gina]

43 minutes ago, gentlebear76 said:

Hi,

You may already know this but I thought I'd share anyway :-) ZWO has an SDK for their cameras which enables you to do the imaging using a simple program. The SDK can be found here: http://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software/ 

This guy: http://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera have used it for his all sky camera, running it on a raspberry pi under raspbian. I'm sooooo tempted right now :-D

/Michael

Thank you Michael - that's very useful   Looks like pretty much everything I want is covered

[Gina]

35 minutes ago, ChrisLX200 said:

I used my 178MM for a 5hr run on the 8th, not trying to go deep as I was just after meteors so 20sec exposures with a gain of just 200.

 

ChrisH

 

edit: and YouTube seem to have broken the vid as it sticks early on - just jump over the sticky point!

Thanks Chris   The video works alright for me except for buffering which is the result of the atrocious broadband connection here ATM.  With a little bit of luck we should have ultrafast BB here with fibre-to-the-premises at up to 1000Mbps symmetrical.  Just hoping the current BB will work until then as it's getting worse and worse.  I had 2Mbps earlier this year - now it's down to 0.5-1Mbps download speed.  Uploads are much worse.

[SilverAstro]

16 minutes ago, Gina said:

except for buffering which is the result of the atrocious broadband connection here ATM.

Download it while you have a cuppa and watch later, with something like YoutubeDownloaderHD freeware (with a portable version for good measure) http://www.youtubedownloaderhd.com/  That one used to work quite well for me and it saved on the nerves

 

[Gina]

That sounds like a good idea   Thanks

It's not my birthday but everything I've ordered (almost) has arrived today   My FLO order including the ASI178MM, the Raspbian micro SD card plus SD adapter, the Peltier TEC and the nylon screws to prevent a thermal shunt when I use it   Forecast is full cloud cover for tonight but tomorrow night is looking good - at least at present.  Fingers crossed for tomorrow night as it's the peak of the Persieds meteor shower apparently.

I don't think I'll mess about with the Peltier but I will change cameras over and also try out the RPi 3.

[Gina]

Reinstalled the ZWO drivers to include the ASI178MM and connected the camera to my laptop.  Here are a couple of test shots with camera perched on living room windowsill pointing roughly south.  Running SharpCap v2.5 which has variable zoom, otherwise much the same as AMCap.  The all sky normal view is given at 25% zoom whilst these screenshots are with 50% and 100%.  The resolution of the ASI178MM is 3096X2080 pixels 1x1 bin and I'm running it at that.  Manually focussed on the horizon so may not be optimum.

[ChrisLX200]

That lens I mentioned which I bought off Ebay, it's a C-Mount so it will screw straight onto a camera. It's actually 1.4mm f/l, f/1.8, and big! Unless I'm missing something there's no screw-type focussing adjustment and whilst it does seem to reach focus it could do with tweaking. I may have to make something that allows for that but I need to look at it a bit more closely first.

This is the lens currently on the GPCAM2

and image it produces poking out through the shed door...

ChrisH

[Gina]

Looks quite reasonable Chris   BIG isn't it

Took me a while to get the camera working had to reinstall driver even though it said the currently installed one was the same!  Now to swap it with the ASI185MC in my ASC.  I think I'll have to start a new thread for this new camera as this thread is specific to the ASI185MC.

Here's the ASI178MM full frame view.

[Gina]

ASI178MM fitted into ASC and refocussed as carefully as I can.  Here is screenshot with 200% zoom capturing just a small portion of the whole frame and another at 33% which is cropping just a bit.  I'm not sure that the lens gives pixel resolution at 1x1 and I might go for 2x2 binning, particularly for posting here as the upload resolution is less than half of the sensor resolution.

[Gina]

ASC mounted on mast and assembly hooked on guttering outside living room window.  Screenshot of AMCap capture with auto exposure and gain.

[Gina]

This cloud is prettier