My experience with The Star Adventurer advanced firmware

[Mr niall]

Hello all

as there are more than a few of us with the Skywatcher Star Adventurer I thought I’d summarise my experience of going to the dark side (then coming back again!) of updating to the “advanced firmware” on the star adventurer.

This doesn’t pretend to be a user guide of “how to” merely a summary of my experience for those that may be interested in going down this route.

Unlike the very cool star adventurer mini (SAM) which has WiFi, it’s bigger brother relies on the user to make all their choices on a big spinny dial and a set of buttons on the back. Therefore the amount of options available to the user is, relatively limited. Now I would suggest that this matters more to wide field and short focal length time lapse photographers than traditional astrophotographers who just need a stable tracking mount of any kind(!) but what the both models do offer is direct DSLR control.

It seems skywatcher have addressed what may or may not be the shortcomings in the SA mount be releasing a new firmware that allows much more user control over, particularly, DSLR control with user customisable options like shutter speed, exposure length, and number of exposures on offer - all controllable through the mount directly.

additionally there are two new modes, the Astro time lapse and the long exposure time lapse which I won’t go into here but there’s loads of info online if you are interested.

As someone keen to extract as much value from a piece of equipment as possible (and similarly a good Scot that would much rather not fork out for an intervalometer if they didn’t have to ?) the increased range of functionality seemed massively appealing.

Upgrading is as simple as downloading the firmware - you do this through your PC via the skywatcher motor controller program (which is a bit of a pain to find) but it’s all simple enough. You also have to print, cut out and install a new control selector dial as all your options have now changed which is quite fun in a Blue Peter type of way...

So... what’s it like to use? In a word.... stressful!

Your SA is now a much more versatile beast, but my experience of trying both long exposures, time lapse and astrophotography with it was an absolute nightmare! You see - because the SA has no actual interface, controlling all inputs is done using the slew buttons on the back. Ingeniously they light up and flash to denote which selection you have chosen. And you use them in conjunction with the N/Timleapse/S toggle switch.

To give an example - to set the length of an exposure for traditional Astro photography you turn the dial to EXP, then, slide your toggle to N on the back. Using the left and right slew buttons to adjust, you are now controlling the “hundreds of seconds” eg 100,200,300 seconds that your exposure length will be. And the way you know what you’ve selected is by looking at how many times the slew buttons lights flash, 3 for 300 seconds 7 for 700 seconds - you get the idea.

you then switch the N/Timelapse/S selector to Timelapse - now you are controlling 10s of seconds on the same fashion, and by switching to S you are controlling seconds - so in this way you can set your exposure time from anything from 0 to 999 seconds. Once this is done you switch to star ⭐️ mode, plug in your camera and, in theory, away you go!

And this effectively is how all user inputs are selected - it really is an ingenious solution and a clever way to extract a lot more Usability from the unit. But in my opinion, it’s pushed the envelope way too far. Because many of the user customisable options are in different formats, maybe degrees movement, or hours and minutes, some of them you have to switch on, some you have to switch off. Some delete themselves every time you switch the mount off, some conflict with each other or do nothing in certain modes and so on. If you are trying a Timelapse for example, where you have to customise several fields it gets very stressful very quickly, additionally when your camera doesn’t do what you want it to do, it can take quite a long time to figure out where you’ve gone wrong. You basically have to go through every setting and count the flashes or lack of flashes thereof. Because there’s no “ok” or “confirm” button I often find myself thinking “is that it? Has it done it? Is that right?” And a classic mistake I made was often leaving the selector on S when I’d finished my selections and the mount would then fac course spin the wrong way.... ? I found it difficult to set up a shoot without a very careful and close consultation with the instruction manual, which in fairness is better than most skywatcher stuff, but still rather confusing at times.

The advanced firmware is so unbelievelably ingenious and clever that I wanted to love it, I really did. And I still marvel at how they managed to get it all together and working. But ultimately every time I used it I could feel the first twinges of annoyance and frustration setting in at the horrifically difficult to use interface and in the end gave up and went back to the original firmware. In my case I think the expression “the grass is greener” has never been more true - I was excited about the added functionality that the advanced firmware offered but in reality when I’d downloaded the standard firmware and reacquainted myself with it I found it was more than good enough.

(But it does mean forking out a tenner for an intervalometer ?)

Niall

Edited June 10, 2018 by Mr niall

[newbie alert]

Stuff that... a intervalometer sounds far easier to use?

[happy-kat]

Reading this made me realise how similar the user experience is to using the extra features on the Virtuoso which use a combinations of buttons and presses to set things up and you sort of hope you did them right.

[Stu1smartcookie]

Soooo glad i didnt do the Advanced firmware update ...i was going to but instead it looks like i just downloaded version 03_06 and the motor firmware program . 

I accept that its a brilliant update , but, for now , im happy using my intervalometer .