Computer Drama's part II

[TechnoViking (James)]

We had a crystal clear night here on the 30th of may, I rushed outside to get the observatory ready for a relaxing night under the stars, go to turn on the PC... no power, a dodgy power supply... this computer seems to be jinxed, first a motherboard, then a videocard now a power supply.

Anyway enough about that, I have been playing around with Raspberry Pi's for a while now and started doing some research using one to control the autoguiding and DSLR and found this great thread on cloudy nights.
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthrea...Number/5369851

My question is has anyone from the IIS community experimented with the Pi to control functions on their mounts with success? (Before i start throwing money at this project)

Cheers

James

[raymo]

Hi James, I'm impressed that you can remember having a clear night
almost a year ago. I'd be lucky to remember a specific clear night a
fortnight ago.
raymo

[alpharipper (Andrew)]

I have one and use it all the time, not for astronomy. Be very interested in more info if there is some out there. Will monitor with a keen eye.

[TechnoViking (James)]

Edit... *30th of April see the frustration, its making me forget what month it is!

[julianh72 (Julian)]

There's a huge hacker community out there working with both Arduino and Raspberry Pi for astronomy applications, including interfacing to a GoTo, or even building your own GoTo from scratch using stepper motors, etc.

Raspberry Pi and Arduino are totality different hardware (although similar in size and price), but because they are both so open, and therefore interesting to hackers, it's pretty easy to adapt Arduino hardware to work with Raspberry Pi, and vice versa.

Raspberry Pi has the advantage that it's a fully fledged Linux computer, so it can potentially run any Linux program, whereas with Arduino, there isn't as much available in the way of commercial software, but being fully open source, the hacker communities are more than willing to share their ideas, designs and code.

For Raspberry Pi, try the AstroHub as a starting point:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/vi...15723&p=443964

For Arduino, start with the user forums; e.g.:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=120124.0

[TechnoViking (James)]

Cheers Julian, look like ive got quite a bit of reading. I do prefer the RPi, although i have been told that the AndroidTV is more powerful and is a better option than the Rpi 512..

For the mean time I will keep using the PC