Help Me Eliminate USB Hubs

[old_eyes]

Just catching up with this thread. Think I miught go down the same route. Using my laptop, which has other duties, just adds to the setup complexity and chance of things arguing. Had another session last night plagued by gremlins that seems to be USB hub/cable related. I was already thinking about a strong powered hub sitting on the tripod spreader shelf, and since I am already thinking about a cheap PC to dedicate to astro, why not go down the mini/nano PC route?

So thanks for all the contributions, and we will see where it leads.

As OP said, observing time is too precious to lose to complex set up and cable wrangling.

Have a great New Year everyone.

[SkyBound]

38 minutes ago, old_eyes said:

Just catching up with this thread. Think I miught go down the same route. Using my laptop, which has other duties, just adds to the setup complexity and chance of things arguing. Had another session last night plagued by gremlins that seems to be USB hub/cable related. I was already thinking about a strong powered hub sitting on the tripod spreader shelf, and since I am already thinking about a cheap PC to dedicate to astro, why not go down the mini/nano PC route?

So thanks for all the contributions, and we will see where it leads.

As OP said, observing time is too precious to lose to complex set up and cable wrangling.

Have a great New Year everyone.

You won't regret the nano PC route, best thing I ever did, and the best £125 I ever spent, on a quad core nano PC with 8gb RAM, and 240gb SSD drive, 6 USB ports of which two are USB 3, and it has a serial port which is also very useful for Astro use, all operated form indoors via teamviewer with my win 10 i3 tablet.

[PhotoGav]

32 minutes ago, SkyBound said:

You won't regret the nano PC route, best thing I ever did, and the best £125 I ever spent, on a quad core nano PC with 8gb RAM, and 240gb SSD drive, 6 USB ports of which two are USB 3, and it has a serial port which is also very useful for Astro use, all operated form indoors via teamviewer with my win 10 i3 tablet.

This is an interesting idea - what nano PC are you using?

[SkyBound]

57 minutes ago, PhotoGav said:

This is an interesting idea - what nano PC are you using?

I bought one of these from eBay,

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDetail.aspx?T=NanoPC&U=en-us0000031

the guy had around 50 of them for £54 each, but you had to put your own RAM and hard drive in, which cost me another £70 approx, I wish I had bought a couple them....as they went like hot cakes, when I went back to get another thaynhad all sold, but there were none anywhere on the internet the same for under £100.....

[PhotoGav]

15 hours ago, SkyBound said:

I bought one of these from eBay,

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDetail.aspx?T=NanoPC&U=en-us0000031

the guy had around 50 of them for £54 each, but you had to put your own RAM and hard drive in, which cost me another £70 approx, I wish I had bought a couple them....as they went like hot cakes, when I went back to get another thaynhad all sold, but there were none anywhere on the internet the same for under £100.....

Ah, I've missed the boat on that one then... Still a good idea and I will keep my search page trained on nano PCs!

[mhard26339]

Hi,  Sorry but coming late to this thread but I had the same problems and wasted money on frustrating fixes. I operate a dome remotely so need reliability, (my build thread is New Observatory in Norfolk UK). The only way I could achieve this effectively was a computer in the dome with all of my devices (dome, cameras, weather station, all sky camera, scope, mount everything) connected via an industrial standard hub  http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Port-Industrial-USB-3-0/dp/B00V6ADRQC  (sorry this comes up on the US site but they are in UK) I went through about 4 others at approx £30 mark but all let me down; they are OK in a warm house but not in a damp albeit de-humidified dome. The computer is then connected via Cat6 Ethernet cable to my router in the house, swithched via an APC 7920 and operated via TeamViewer.

I would not say it has worked flawlessly but the connections have not been the problem. My experience and advice is to read as many blogs, list the problems other guys have had and how they solved them and incorporate their solution of your choice because as sure as eggs are eggs you will experience them at some time. By the way, don't check the back balance too often either!

Regards

Mike

[patm]

Has anyone tried mounting a raspberry pi/beaglebone black/whatever running VirtualHere instead of using a remote desktop?

Virtualhere works sort of like a USB to Ethernet extender. You run the server on a device that has all the USB devices connected then a client on whatever device you want to use. The client sees the remote USB devices as if they were plugged into the client so you can use your (more powerful) main computer to run all the software rather than using up bandwidth sending the remote desktop and slowing things down using a much less powerful NUC for all the software.

I'm going to be trying that sometime in the next couple of weeks (waiting for my scope and LPI-GM to arrive). The only thing I'm not sure about is the 100M ethernet speed from the Pi. It should be fine when imaging/guiding since not of it will be HD live video. Theuncertain part is when using LiveView on my modded T3i for aligning/focusing but considering its a USB2 device and I won't be guiding at the same time, it should be fine.

[Marci]

Most here would simply install INDI on the Pi, and use an INDI client on the main machine, as it's designed specifically for astro use.

http://www.indilib.org

[patm]

First time I've heard of Indi. I'll have to read up on that!

[patm]

I investigated and the problem with Indi is it only supports a few applications. For instance I use stellarium and there's no stellarium support. The nice thing about VirtualHere is it knows nothing about specific devices or software, its just extends USB over ethernet.

 

I just tried VirtualHere with my Canon DSLRs and it just works. BYEOS just thinks its got the camera attached locally.