Laptops and the cold!

[Andrew INT]

Hi All,

It's a bit below freezing tonight. I was wondering if anyone has any tips for protecting a laptop in the cold? I doubt the screens like temperatures this cold. I'm  not going to be imaging for long - an hour at most for Jupiter and Mars. 

What do people do to protect their laptops during all-nighters in the cold winter? Are rugged laptops the way forwards, or some form of heating...or just an cardboard box or something?

Andrew

[Cosmic Geoff]

My Dell Vostro laptop does not appear affected by the cold.  Remember that they generate internal heat - about 8 watts in this case.  There is probably an operating temperature range quoted for your laptop if you can look it up.

[ONIKKINEN]

Mini-PCs seem to be resistant to the cold. Probably because there is no display or keyboard to freeze. The heat coming from the PC itself has kept mine completely frost free even down to -27 where everything else on the mount and scope is covered in a thick layer of rock hard frost. Runs very slowly though, but i dont know if thats on my tablet accessing it or on the mini-pc but anyway it can have input delay of up to a couple seconds at these temperatures.

[Xilman]

2 hours ago, Andrew INT said:

Hi All,

It's a bit below freezing tonight. I was wondering if anyone has any tips for protecting a laptop in the cold?

Perhaps keep it indoors? I'm serious.

Put the absolute minimum equipment out in the cold and drive it over ethernet or WiFi . USB should work if the telescope is only a few metres away.

I know quite a few people who do that including, to some extent, myself where the computers are in a nicely lit and comfortable control room and only the imaging train and dome controller is upstairs in the relative cold.

Edited December 10, 2022 by Xilman
Add "room".

[Avocette]

2 hours ago, Andrew INT said:

Hi All,

It's a bit below freezing tonight. I was wondering if anyone has any tips for protecting a laptop in the cold? I doubt the screens like temperatures this cold. I'm  not going to be imaging for long - an hour at most for Jupiter and Mars. 

What do people do to protect their laptops during all-nighters in the cold winter? Are rugged laptops the way forwards, or some form of heating...or just an cardboard box or something?

Andrew

At any time of the year your laptop would be susceptible to dew, possibly more than to frost…. I use a plastic storage box on its side (rather than a cardboard box) to enclose the laptop which is a 2019 model which runs on its lithium battery for around 8 hours. I run Astroberry on a Raspberry Pi at the mount and link in with the laptop with WiFi to control it, and when I go inside to warm up I carry the laptop and storage box with me, leaving Astroberry to continue without interruption. 

[Shimrod]

3 hours ago, Andrew INT said:

Hi All,

It's a bit below freezing tonight. I was wondering if anyone has any tips for protecting a laptop in the cold? I doubt the screens like temperatures this cold. I'm  not going to be imaging for long - an hour at most for Jupiter and Mars. 

What do people do to protect their laptops during all-nighters in the cold winter? Are rugged laptops the way forwards, or some form of heating...or just an cardboard box or something?

Andrew

I've had a tablet frost over (which stopped the touchscreen working) but otherwise was fine. The biggest issue is reduced battery performance if you are not running on mains power. My laptop (HP Spectre X2) has a warning not to operate in temperatures below zero because it may damage the battery. It may be coincidence but I have recently replaced the battery in that laptop as two cells had failed and what should have been 3-4 hours of cold weather performance had dropped to around 10 minutes! For reference, the laptop is around six years old and has had heavy use in the past, so the battery may just have reached end of life anyway. The tablet mentioned at the start is nearly 9 years old and still operating without any issues.

[Andrew INT]

15 hours ago, Xilman said:

Perhaps keep it indoors? I'm serious.

Put the absolute minimum equipment out in the cold and drive it over ethernet or WiFi . USB should work if the telescope is only a few metres away.

I know quite a few people who do that including, to some extent, myself where the computers are in a nicely lit and comfortable control room and only the imaging train and dome controller is upstairs in the relative cold.

I have a 15m powered USB cable - I'll try running things that way next time. My plan it to build an observatory with a warm room next year. That will solve most of the problem...but generate a load more I expect

Thank for the advice!

[Andrew INT]

13 hours ago, Avocette said:

At any time of the year your laptop would be susceptible to dew, possibly more than to frost…. I use a plastic storage box on its side (rather than a cardboard box) to enclose the laptop which is a 2019 model which runs on its lithium battery for around 8 hours. I run Astroberry on a Raspberry Pi at the mount and link in with the laptop with WiFi to control it, and when I go inside to warm up I carry the laptop and storage box with me, leaving Astroberry to continue without interruption. 

I only thought of a cardboard box since it may give a little more insulation than a plastic storage box. 

The Astroberry sounds like a good solution. Do you find the WiFi link is reliable enough? My pier is about 20ft from the house.

[carastro]

All of my laptops (except 1 which switches itself off in the cold!!!) work perfectly happily in sub zero temperatures.  I go to Astro camps fairly regularly and have to protect them from the dew.  In the past I used to use plastic boxes which had hingeable halved closing lids.  I made holes in the back of the box to allow cables to pass through and this would give good dew and frost protection. 

 You can see the box open in this picture. 

However they do take up a lot of space in the car, and because I also use a dual rig which needs 2 laptops I don't have space on my table (inside my camping Obsy) to place 2 laptops side by side, and so I devised a home made water-proof bag made from Supermarket bags which I close with velcro when I leave the scope unattended and imaging.  This way I can put the rear laptop on top of the front one when looking at it saving space both on the table inside the camping Obsy and in my car.  

A bit of a Heath Robinson effort but it does the job.  (Had to merge two Bags together to make the entrance wide enough to open the laptop.

Carole 

  

Edited December 11, 2022 by carastro

[Xilman]

48 minutes ago, Andrew INT said:

I have a 15m powered USB cable - I'll try running things that way next time.

Good luck.

A ~10m unpowered USB cable worked for my old SBIG camera but the latency was too poor for the new SX 814 and the old control PC. Putting in a powered USB hub at the scope and installing a PC which was 10 years newer (the old one had caught a nasty attack of death in the interim) made everything work again.

Paul

[Carbon Brush]

A laptop was intended to be in 'office' conditions. 15C to 25C.
If you think about the problems usually reported it is overheating due to vents obscured by paper, or sitting on a warm lap!
In practice the electronics will work a lot colder than your office. But at some point things go wrong.
The good news is that a 'fault' indiuced by cold will usually clear once the temperature has risen.
Whether the laptop works on a cold night is only established by trial and error.
You can leave the laptop outside running any software on a cloudy night so hopefully a nights imaging is not unexpectedly lost👍

The biggest dew hazard comes from bring your sub zero laptop into your warm and very hunid home.
Put it in a reasonably well sealed poly bag while outside. That keeps the reasonably dry air inside it.
Then bring it indoors and leave it sealed until the morning.
Now the laptop is warm you can remove it from the bag without worry.
It contains warm air that contains at lot less moisture than your house air.

As for rugged laptops. My experience of rugged/industrial computers is that they use the same innards as their office version.
A rubber sleeve and chunky keypad, but beyond that, very little.

HTH, David.

[Avocette]

56 minutes ago, Andrew INT said:

I only thought of a cardboard box since it may give a little more insulation than a plastic storage box. 

The Astroberry sounds like a good solution. Do you find the WiFi link is reliable enough? My pier is about 20ft from the house.

I run my equipment in various places in the garden to optimise clear, obstruction-free views, but all slightly further from the house (up to perhaps 30 feet maximum). When setting up, carrying out polar alignment and monitoring the first few captures I am close to the mount with the laptop on a small garden table. Afterwards indoors, I have the laptop near a patio door so the WiFi is only penetrating through glass. With the RPi4 and Astroberry software package I force the WiFi hotspot to use the 5GHz WiFi band since there is evidence that the 2.4 GHz band interferes with the use of USB3.0. My RPi4 is in an aluminium ‘flirc’ case, mounted so that the plastic bottom face is away from mount metalwork. This works very well for me - I even run two Astroberry rigs from the one laptop by setting up two different 5GHz hotspot SSIDs (AstroberryBlue and AstroberryRed).

[AMcD]

I have a HUNSN industrial mini-PC permanently installed in my observatory and that has shown no sign of problems, or reduction in speed during this latest cold snap.  However, when I went into the observatory yesterday morning, I found that the very old flat screen monitor that I have in there for when I need to do maintenance or configuration on the system had cracked, causing the liquid crystal to leak across the screen 😳

[SteveNickolls]

Hi, regarding USB cables. Control over distance is quite possible using USB. For years I successfully used active 20m USB cable to control imaging from indoors. Not all pc USB busses are the same though. Good luck.

Cheers,

Steve

[Cosmic Geoff]

I found the environmental specs for a recent Dell Vostro laptop (5490). It says:

Operating: 0°C to 35°C (32°F to 95°FRelative Humidity: 10% to 90% (non-condensing

Storage: -40°C to 65°C (-40°F to 149°FRelative Humidity: 0% to 95% (non-condensing)

Note that with laptop design a challenge is to keep certain of the components cool, rather than prevent them from freezing.  If you take a laptop from a warm room and then power it up, its innards are never going to fall to ambient temperature.

I used to use a laptop that consumed about 20 watts and emitted a constant stream of warm air. No danger of that one freezing up. 🙂

One ought to protect a laptop from dewfall, but nervous owners may note that I have never bothered with either of my laptops and there have been no ill effects.

[JeremyS]

Ive had two laptops running in my observatory for years with no problems at all. They control my meteor video cameras. 
Having written this, though, we all know what is going to happen….