Wireless Control

[rogerg (Roger)]

I think we all agree that we hate cables and given the choice would get rid of them...

Just last night I worked out how I could control my setup (portable or observatory) via wireless!

I've given it a lot of thought in the past, considered using a PocketPC with bluetooth, EeePC and all that. Nothing really appealed enough to actually do it.

My solution which I discovered last night: My new media player (Cowon Q5W) has built in WiFi, runs WindowsCE 5 and comes with Remote Desktop installed. Start up everything like usual on the PC/laptop, then connect to it using Remote Desktop! Sure the screen res is only 800x480 as that's the Q5's resolution, but it's awsome! The Q5 has a 5" touch screen, so I scan move about, zoom, etc in TheSky (via RD) then slew, take images, etc. Very nerdy

Battery life on the Q5 with WiFi active is about 2 hours.

At astro camps/star parties it means I could be across the field chatting to people and keep an eye on the imaging progress, log in now and then, not just assuming it's going OK.

I suppose you could do the same with any WiFi laptop but I only have one, and laptops are a lot more combersom, you can't just hold them in the palm of your hand.

Anyone have better ways of doing Wireless control of their rig?

Roger.

[ozstockman (Mike)]

Hi Roger,


Sorry, don't want to ruin your excitement but have you tested it during the imaging process?
I think you might be disappointed. At least I was when I came to the same idea. Remote desktop works in a way that may take a lot of computer resources and network bandwidth especially when you try to run any video streaming software like PHD. It means that any time your remote pc(in your case Cowon Q5W) will detect any changes on screen it will dump all screen details for sending it to the PC you use to control it from.

There should be no problem if both PCs are powerfull enough( a lot of memory, powerfull processors) and you connect those PCs through 100Mbs CAT5 cable but with slow PCs and wireless connection you will experience 1-2 seconds delay and sometimes it can just hang on your PCs.

cheers,

Mike

[rogerg (Roger)]

Originally Posted by ozstockman

Sorry, don't want to ruin your excitement but have you tested it during the imaging process?

Good point, but seems to be OK for the obs setup at least. I haven't used for a night of imaging (was cloudy) but have used it to take images and so on for my observatory, seems OK.

I think something which might make it capable here is I don't work with video in my obs, it's all ST7 individual shots. So I haven't noticed a problem.

In fact it seemed very responsive, no different to using my obs via Remote Desktop on my laptop, so I hadn't considered the problem you're proposing. Navigating TheSky & changing apps & viewing in photoshop seemed fine while CCDSoft was taking autoguide 1 sec exposures and so on. There is the expected pause when it downloads a full frame image over the LPT.

But, perhaps I will with the portable setup where it uses the QHY for autoguiding, time will tell

[Gama]

I have been using wireless for around 5 years now.
I had a Celeron 1GHz up till around a year ago, then it died, so i grabbed a Pentium4 2.66 GHz, and she's still breathing.
No problems with bandwidths etc, as the wireless is a 54Mbit, and never really had an issue.
You can either run remote PC on the computer, (So you basically get the screen from the other PC on your pc), or run 3rd party apps. You can then process images on you computer in the warmth of your room.
Files are downloaded on the local PC and then you can transfer them while its exposing and thus not using too much resources. Comes in handy in winter !!.

Theo

[ozstockman (Mike)]

Theo, have you tried to run PHD on your remote PC in observatory and then set up and monitor autoguiding from PC in your house? My point was that in this case it's really slow. Moving files or just running remote desktop is more than ok with wireless, but when it comes to frequent remote desktop screen update.. that what PHD will force system to do.. it doesn't work well.

May be it was just my PCs or a poor wireless signal but it didn't all work as I expected with PHD running on my remote PC. I think I'll need to give it another try with more powerfull PCs and better wireless connection.

[thunderchildobs]

When looking at using a wireless security camera to watch the scope in my observatory, I have been told by various sales people, that the wireless signal doesn't like going through metal. The observatory is your standard metal garden shed variety. I am not sure if / what that means for a wireless network.

[Gerald Sargent]

Harvey Norman, and doubtless others too, sell the Netgwar Wireless-N
Dual band transceiver. This has a USB fitting and can give a computer a
"remote" aerial where needed, ie outside a metal shed using a 5m UDB
cable. The unit I have is a WINDA3100. Gerald.

[ozstockman (Mike)]

I tested remote desktop connection via wireless to my new Core2Duo 2Mhz 2Mgb of RAM laptop and it seemed to work excellent. It was running PHD, Nebulosity 2 and Cartes du Ciel at the same time. I haven't noticed any delay in PHD capturing but there was a small but still acceptable delay when Nebulosity was trying to display a new image coming from a QHY8.