Raspberry Pi 3 + INDI -> Astro Imaging Automation

[zfedoran]

Hey guys,

I recently found out about INDI and Ekos and was curious to see how well it worked (check it out here).

I had a raspberry Pi collecting dust and after a couple minor setup steps, my equipment was recognized and connected. My mount, DSLR, shutter release serial cable, and guide camera all connect directly to the Raspberry Pi. I then connect to the Pi from my mac laptop using SSH and the Virtual Machine provided by http://www.indilib.org/. 

The nice thing about the PI is that it uses little power (about 0.5 amps at 5v), has 4 usb ports, and has built in wifi. I picked up a usb battery bank for the Pi and threw the two into a project box. I'm fairly sure the Pi would run 20 - 40 hours on this small battery alone.

 

 

Anyways, I've seen a couple posts touching on this subject and thought I should share my efforts as I'm quite excited about it. It seems like it will perform better than my previous setup.

 

My previous setup consisted of an intel compute stick, small usb hub, 12v battery with a 5v converter, and an additional windows laptop to control it all. I would connect all my gear to the stick through the usb hub. In order to get everything going, I'd remote desktop into the compute stick through my windows laptop. This worked ok, but the compute stick (running windows) was unreliable, there were a number of imaging sessions where it decided it would be best to install an update for half an hour. Other times, it refused to auto connect to the wifi hotspot without logging in, meaning I could not remote desktop into it and would need to connect a screen. Eventually, I tried using a LattePanda board as well but had similar experiences due to Windows 10. Regardless, I do recommend the LattePanda for windows applications, it is a slightly stronger board than the Pi and has an Arduino built in but unfortunately is not too great at running linux yet.

(old setup below)