It's all useless! Are there any good ways to control my setup? : (

[Albir phil]

I have a HEQ 5  this I run with a synscan dongle 80 Euro on my I pad or mobile.A USB extension Cable no problems 😀

[dan_adi]

18 hours ago, pipnina said:

At least back when my setup consisted of a DSLR on a newt that I focused manually, and framed manually with the HEQ5 handset and then didn't even guide, I could get mediocre results *consistently*!

Controlling my setup has been a perpetual pain ever since computerising it early last year. Either requiring a laptop to sit out there with it, a raspberry pi running astroberry, or now a headless mini PC that I remote into. Each system has its own problems (some of which center around Kstars, but that is behaving itself at present). The laptop would get condensate all over the screen and require a box for it to sit on, and often kstars would have issues, plus my laptop is needed sometimes for work so I would have to remember to collect it in the morning.

The raspberry PI worked reasonably well, however I was only able to source a 2GB version which was NOT enough memory for kstars and PHD to run at the same time, it crashed often due to running out of memory. It also required a very good USB wifi dongle to reach my router even though it was only on the other side of a bit of glass 15 meters away!

This mini PC worked ok to a certain extent, but controlling it remotely is infernal somehow even compared to the RPI which also shared its screen via the same VNC protocol. And what's worse I am struggling to get a fast enough internet connection to it for it to even work properly! The virgin media hub estimates it is getting between 5 and 15mbits connection speed, but the 240 second download time for a single 50mb sub to my pc inside suggests it's closer to 200KB/s or 1.6Mb/s! It was fine last time I used it and no amount of reboots or reconnections fixed it. First clear night in a month and I couldn't get far enough to even focus!

There has to be a better way that allows me to get the telescope up and going computer wise quickly and without me needing to stand next to it for the whole session. I'd think about the ASI Air but I don't think it supports my pegasus power box advance or my risingcam 571 camera. Am I supposed to cast magic spells on it or something? 😭

Every time I solve one problem I come face to face with another and it makes this 50KG lump that has cost me more than £5000 feel more like I paid extortionate sums for a piece of garden furniture than a photographic system.

My Canon AE1-Program on my Star Adventurer took its half hour of images admirably even if the battery for the electric shutter was near death afterwards.

What can I even do here besides run an ethernet cable out the window or find some totally different system of control? Help!

I use USB to Ethernet devices. The signal is send through the local area network and I keep the control computer Inside. 

This way I had 0 issues with connectivity for the last couple of years.

A pegasus ultimate coupled with 1 or 2 of these works reliably https://www.silextechnology.com/connectivity-solutions/device-connectivity/ds-600

[PhilB61]

As previously mentioned try storing your images locally at the telescope,  don't try and download them at the same time as controlling your system, do it at the end of the session or in the morning. My system is windows based, I remote desktop over wifi from inside to a laptop at the telescope end and the only time it hasn't worked well was when I tried downloading at the same time as an imaging run. What I now do is run a sequence in NINA which starts the image download automatically at the end of my imaging session using the Robocopy plugin. In my experience Windows, NINA and Remote Desktop just works, every time, with my mix of hardware from different manufacturers, iOptron mount, Altair Cooled Hypercam,  ZWO EAF, and ZWO guidecam.