Gigabyte brix telescope control

[petejw]

Im looking to buy a mini pc for running astrophotography on my scope.

I want to run stellarium, apt, ascom and connecting an heq5 scope and canon dslr camera.

The pc will be controlled by remote desktop over wired ethernet and any images will be transferred to my main laptop for processing.

Quite a few people seem to be using a gigabyte brix 2807 and I would be interested in hearing from anyone who uses one of these or something similar and has a similar setup to what I am planning.

Is the 2807 sufficiently powerful to run my planned setup will I need something more powerful

Edited November 5, 2019 by petejw

[pete_l]

1 hour ago, petejw said:

I want to run stellarium, apt, ascom and connecting an heq5 scope and canon dslr camera

Is the 2807 sufficiently powerful to run my planned setup will I need something more powerful

I have a very similar setup. HEQ5. ED80, DSLR, QHY5 guider and a QHY6 widefield, so 3 USB cameras running together with no problems.

Software wise I stay with Win7 and I don't use Stellarium, but Cartes du Ciel. Though all the rest .... yes. Flawless performance and more than adequate for the job.
My Brix 2807 worked very well until I dropped it. But I replaced it with a BXBT-1900 and that is at least as good.

Edited November 5, 2019 by pete_l

[Northernlight]

I use the Gigabyte Brix no problem running Windows 10 for my setup. Never had any bother with it, and it runs SGP with camera, focuser and shed roof control, as well as Cartes-Du-Ceil and PHD2 guiding with my lodestar.

Neat & tidy setup that just seems to work. Mine is set in the bios to automatically turn on when the shed power is switched on remotely. I give it 2 mins 2 fully start up and then just rdp onto it from my laptop in the house and set my job away.  I can then just check in on the progress using rdp from my ipad.

Simples.....

[petejw]

Thanks both, really useful information.

Did you go for HDD or SSD and what size ? My plan is 240GB SSD which, I think, should be more than enough.

[wuthton]

I'd highly recommend the Zotac Ci series as they have 6 usb ports so you can avoid troublesome hubs. 

I've had an on mount Ci320 for a couple of years with zero regrets. An unexpected bonus is an improvement to guiding as you massively reduce the number of cables going to the floor and the drag that goes with them. 

Get an ssd, mine's quite small as all images are saved to Onedrive and then cut and pasted to my in house PC the following day. 

Edited November 6, 2019 by wuthton

[petejw]

Thanks for the thoughts everyone. I went for the brix 2807 with 8gb memory 240 GB SSD and running Windows 7.

I installed all of the software but found that stellarium maxed out the cpu. However, I discovered that I could run stellarium on my laptop in the house and use it to control the scope remotely. Happily it is all running smoothly and very happy with the solution. 

Anyone know when it's going to stop raining?