Can an under £100 mini PC at the mount cut the mustard with DSO imaging?

[Varavall]

There was an offer on A-Z for a BMAX fanless mini PC which appeared to have sufficient spec (just) to run NINA, PHD2, CdeC, ASTAP and ASI studio. It is only a celeron dual core, 6GB RAM, 64GB storage and Windows 10, but I thought worth a punt for 99.99 euros for me in Spain or £90 in UK.

  

It came with a power supply, HDMI cable, VESA TV bracket and the mini PC.

I happened to have an old USB keyboard lying around and a USB mouse which made configuring it easy when connected to the TV via HDMI. The mini PC was fast to boot and straight into the familiar Win10 setup. I setup a user account without password so it would boot into Windows directly when powered on. The automatic updates are disabled by default, so it is necessary to search for Windows updates. As usual there were many updates to be installed. It is to be noted that the processor is not the fastest and it took almost 3 hours to download the updates and install them; be patient when the message "Do not turn off your computer" seems to be there forever.

With Windows up to date I installed Chrome Remote Desktop which I used for control and to instal all the software I would require for DSO imaging. The installing of ASCOM through to NINA together with all the drivers all went without a hitch and surprisingly quickly. Then to transfer as much of the configuration files from my laptop to the mini PC as possible; easy process more or less. ASCOM was a little more troublesome, so I needed to configure it all manually once the equipment was attached. Allow a good few hours to configure and check. When everything was installed 20GB or free space remained for capturing images. The device was now ready to attach to my mount.

I attached it via a homemade support behind the guide scope. The power supply is via a standard 5.5mm 12V jack, so I soldered in a cable run and jack from  the 12V power supply to the rest of the equipment.

Powered up the kit and waited to see what happened. First thing I discovered was that which USB cable needs to go to which USB socket. In my case the EQDIR cable needed to be in the lower USB2 socker, the ASI1600MM in the USB3 socket adjacent to the memory card socket and the guide camera to the other USB3 socket. Once I discovered that foible everything connected up and the software could see all the bits of kit.

All that was left to do was do an imaging run, skies were clear and wind gusting to F7, but good enough to see how it would go. I set it to do a 4 panel mosaic of the Rosette nebula which included a meridian flip. 

There are only 4 subs per NB filter for each panel, but with a quick bit of processing I can see that the mini PC performed brilliantly.  The imaging was done with a SW 200pds, ASI1600MM-cool, HEQ5 with belt mod, QHY5l-II-C guide camera., NINA, PHD2 and ASTAP sky maps for plate solving.

I transfered the images by attaching a USB3 hard drive to the mini PC  as transferring 4GB of data by wireless means would take forever! An invertment in a fast memory card would make that task easier.

I hope someone finds this interesting and/or helpful. I'm happy to respond to questions.

Adrian

[R26 oldtimer]

That's pretty much what I did with a gigabyte brix-3160. You don't need much for image acquisition, and can be had for almost as much as an Rpi4. Also got a 32Gb mini SD card for image transfer.