For the past week nearly two, I've been re doing my setup to go standalone, so my entire setup can be run from a battery.
This got me exploring Astroberry on a RPi4. This was the cheapest under $150 computer and also the lightest option.
Setting up the Pi4 was simple and easy as I have done this many times before with Ubuntu/Linux packages. Once installed I came across kstars\ekos which is the main imaging package and INDI drivers(similar to ASCOM).
From this point the setup was not simple by any means, getting all the USB's to work on the Pi connected to all the equipment was at least 2-3 day worth of reading and trying different things. Eventually yesterday I had everything working and got to a point I understood 90% of the available setting was confident that I could complete a imaging session.
Now I had my mount polar aligned and setup the telescope, the fact that there was only two cable connected to the power(battery) was a joy to see and experience. Powered up and I was connected to all equipment the felt so good how well the system was working.
Slewed to the horsehead nebula and started to frame the target, this is where things got difficult. Being used to framing in (spoilt) NINA, faming my target was very difficult (not impossible). Unless you have a motorised rotator in your setup might as well forget it. Anyways now realising I was not going to be able to continue on my current project I decide to burn the rest of the night exploring and getting trial images.
Slewed to M45 and framed it to some level and started, Autofocus routine plate solving, guiding and capture. Every one of these routine threw rocks at me but eventually got it to work.
I tried a few different targets and did some trial runs. Everything worked but not without issues. Tracking would stop then I need to chase a setting that fixed it, then PHD2 guiding would stop then troubleshoot that etc.
Finally it was time to pack up. Reflecting on this experience I can say that the Astroberry RPi4 setup was great and the ability to control so much of your equipment was awesome as much as it was overwhelming when things didn't work. This setup has great potential and the ability to keep your setup simple, but I think the software and the development has atleast another year to go before it can catchup to something like NINA/SGP. The software reliability is a 4/5, planning required prior to setup 2.5/5 (needs a lot of planning). For me given that I can only do a few hours of imaging a night and returning back to the same target and being able to frame that target pretty accurately is important, I've decided that I am going back to NINA on a laptop.
I will still keep exploring an setting up the RPi4, because I think it could be work for me one day but for now back to the drawing board.
