I've updated to v2 now.
but how do you use the red light feature that's mentioned? it says it removes the need for a red screen for the laptop?
is it specific to backyard eos only as it has a red interface, or is it for any application and the whole desktop?
I've updated to v2 now.
but how do you use the red light feature that's mentioned? it says it removes the need for a red screen for the laptop?
is it specific to backyard eos only as it has a red interface, or is it for any application and the whole desktop?
Cheers.
It's called BackyarRED. It's a separate executable completely independent from BackyardEOS.
BackyardRED is free to everyone and can be downloaded from the website www.backyardeos.com.
Is the ASCOM focuser drivers implemented yet or a comming feature? I ask because in V2 it doesn't seem to find any focusers that are ASCOM (6) compliant.
I have a Meade Motorfocuser (#497) connected via a ShoeString Astronomy Focus Controller FCUSB and JMI software like PC Focus Control PCFC works fine. I installed the FCUSB ASCOM driver and the Meade 497 ASCOM driver and the JMI ASCOM driver. I than ran the ASCOM6 compatability tester - all 1,100 tests it said where okay.
However in BackyardEOS - under focuser - it brings up a diagolue box which is empty and find focuser doesn't seem to find any ASCOM compliant focusers and the ... search box doesn't seem to do anything. The camera was switched off - does this functionality only work once the camera is switched on maybe?
Thanks, Matthew
OK - scratch that - I just closed and re-started Backyard EOS, all's well! Clicking ASCOM -> Focuser -> ... brought up the ASCOM chooser, it saw the JMI device and connected to it fine!
OK - scratch that - I just closed and re-started Backyard EOS, all's well! Clicking ASCOM -> Focuser -> ... brought up the ASCOM chooser, it saw the JMI device and connected to it fine!
Must say the software is very intuitive!
Thanks Matthew, user experience is 50% of the feature for me so everything I do has to be as intuitive as it can be
Under the ASCOM telescope it says support is comming soon. What are you intending to support and roughly when. Is this get RA / DEC position for meta data on images to make later plate solves easier or some slew and gotos capability - like re-centre this image.
I'd love to be able to reference an image say M42 that I like - say its picture 32 in a library, slew to M42 (plate solve) and have a combination of software take a shot and re-centre what the telescope is pointing to on that same image (picture 32) so for a series of successive nights the image is pretty much in the exact same position (pror to dithering).
I think MaximDL + the full PinPoint + AGP Mapper is supposed to give me this - be nice if it was a tad simpler!
Under the ASCOM telescope it says support is comming soon. What are you intending to support and roughly when. Is this get RA / DEC position for meta data on images to make later plate solves easier or some slew and gotos capability - like re-centre this image.
I'd love to be able to reference an image say M42 that I like - say its picture 32 in a library, slew to M42 (plate solve) and have a combination of software take a shot and re-centre what the telescope is pointing to on that same image (picture 32) so for a series of successive nights the image is pretty much in the exact same position (pror to dithering).
I think MaximDL + the full PinPoint + AGP Mapper is supposed to give me this - be nice if it was a tad simpler!
Support will be progressive, I will add basic functionality to move RA/DEC. I hope to have something out in the 1st half of 2012. Future enhancements will go on from there with user feedback.
I actually got to use it for the first time today. It has a lovely interface and once I figured a few things out (like choosing FCUSB focuser, not JMI or PCFC - all of which are components in the focusing chain - things went very well.
Impressed you can specific the ISO for your individual shots!
A few suggestions / queries:
1. Can default ISO be set anywhere - I like to start at ISO400, seems to default to 1600
2. Drift align - is it only enabled on Canon cameras with live view? Can't it be implemented with camera that don't have these capabilities - i.e. by taking 1 second shots for instance?
3. Imaging taking BIAS shots - which is supposed to be the fastest dark frame you can take - for a Canon 400D 1/4,000th of a second - I couldn't get it to do less than 1 seconds - is that a limitation in the software or I doing something wrong
4. Telescope ASCOM settings - could you store RA / DEC in the shot or add to it if one wanted to convert a RAW to a Tif or fits format and process them in MaximDL - which I understood looked for that image metadata in the header section?
5. When I instal a later release - is there a way to remeber all my settings, my licence info and ASCOM drivers selected?
So I could only play with dark frames - raining today - next I want to learn how to store, manage and flick through light frames.
The more I use it the more I am impressed with what you have achieved.
1. The ISO cannot be defaulted to a user setting right now.
2. Drift alignment, it could be done without live view… but it may come at a cost of a few hundreds shutter actuations . I may support web cams in the future.
3. For BIAS, you should/must select the lowest TV shutter. The field indicating BULB in the image capture plan is actually a drop down list and contains all TV shutter your camera support. Select 1/4000 and start capturing.
4. I could store the RC/DEC in the exif data once I add ASCOM telescope support.
The ability to get backyard to auto center an image to a user defined location would be awesome. Currently I use maxim for framing my shots then jump back to byeos for the capture plan , It would be great if I didn't need to.
Keep up the great work your doing, you pack a lot in for the very low price that you charge.
I got the BIAS shots working thank you - once I scrolled out of BULB mode - all was excellent.
I also got the Eclipse framing working very well. Called up a shot of M42 from last night ( a 2 minute shot to use as a reference frame) and then I just kept doing 4 second shots - adjust, loop until the stars were aligned to yesterday nights reference. That is a feature I would love have further automated.
The other thing I was expecting was a way to scroll through several nights images easily. When I select a historic image - say from 30 minute ago - it draws it large in its own window and I can't step to next. I'd love to be able to either go forward or backwar in the pop up window (rather than close, select next and have another pop up window to deail with). I used to use Canon's ZoomBrowser a lot. You had a view with a string of thumbnail images down the bottom - and whatever you click on its image would appear in the main view window.
The only thing I can make appear in the main view window (without openning up a seperate window) is the current image.
Lastly on M42 the histogram (see image below) shows roughly equal amounts of Red, Green and Blue light gathered - but the Red is way to the left - dim zone, probably due to the standard Canon Infrared cut off filter. I'd guess that the Red data is about say 10% behind green which is 1% less intense as the Blue data. The camera is in Automatic white balance mode - does this mean I should set a custom white balance mode or is it correct in what it is showing? (or is it saying go to a G2V star and calibrate!)
Thank you, Matt
PS
I get an annoying Windows Error message that BackYardEOS has a problem and has to be shut down once or twice a night - even though it all appears to be working well! If I Ignore the frustratingly placed pop up window I can do everything normally. It generally occurs if something big and demanding is running in the background hogging the CPU - e.g. DeepSpaceStacker during an imaging run. If I click Ok or cancel it simply shuts down your program!
I notice if i leave BackyardEOS active - with the camera connected somewhere in a 24 hour windows the CPU utilisation under Windows7 Ultimate 64bit - goes to nearly 98%, with System Interrupts - Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Servic Routines being the culprit.
BackyardEOS is the only new software I have added to the Astrolab's main computer this month. When I close BackyardEOS CPU utilisation immediately goes back down below 20% on both cores.
The problem doesn't manifest immediately - sometimes it takes 6 - 16 hours - but this PC is on 7 * 24 and would normally have maybe 16 programs open and dormant - and only use 12% CPU on system tasks and 8% or less on apps. Seeing over 85% system CPU usage when every program bar BackyardEOS is the only thing active is a worry.
From my understanding of microsoft knowlegde bases - such a high System Interrupt allocation is put down to Windows searching and not finding the correct hardware driver.
utility and get more information. It would be useful if you can share if there is anything else I should check. Does the Canon driver possibly not register with Windows correctly (unless BackyardEOS is first run as administrator)?
I notice if i leave BackyardEOS active - with the camera connected somewhere in a 24 hour windows the CPU utilisation under Windows7 Ultimate 64bit - goes to nearly 98%, with System Interrupts - Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Servic Routines being the culprit.
BackyardEOS is the only new software I have added to the Astrolab's main computer this month. When I close BackyardEOS CPU utilisation immediately goes back down below 20% on both cores.
The problem doesn't manifest immediately - sometimes it takes 6 - 16 hours - but this PC is on 7 * 24 and would normally have maybe 16 programs open and dormant - and only use 12% CPU on system tasks and 8% or less on apps. Seeing over 85% system CPU usage when every program bar BackyardEOS is the only thing active is a worry.
From my understanding of microsoft knowlegde bases - such a high System Interrupt allocation is put down to Windows searching and not finding the correct hardware driver.
utility and get more information. It would be useful if you can share if there is anything else I should check. Does the Canon driver possibly not register with Windows correctly (unless BackyardEOS is first run as administrator)?
Ummm... I'm not doing much when the application is idling... but I do check for updated weather information every 30 seconds and I'm wondering if maybe it could be related to the TEMPerHUM reading if none is available. Can you try setting the weather provider to "YAHOO" and _not_ configure the WOEID. This configuration should bypass reading the usb TEMPerHUM device. If this is the culprit we should know quickly.
Shows the USBPORT.SYS has a stellar lead in DPC and ISR calls over all other processes and services. (checking under device manager - search online for later drivers says completely up to date)
I have ordered a TEMPerHUM device two weeks ago should be here soon - will try your advice and report back!
Set to Yahoo and left WOEID blank - will see what happens!
Re-started - all okay so far - have latency monitor and taskmanager going - will see what it looks like in a few hours.
* * * * *
Yep - problem re-occurs. I can minimise the occurence of the issue - by shutting down BackYardEOS until I need it, but I really want to find the solution. Will check Service Pack 1 not only downloaded the latest usbport.sys to the library - but actually installed it in the system32/drivers folder
* * * * *
All drivers are current - no hot fixes issued. Re-booted and did a darks run 8 * 3600 seconds - CPU utilisation is still low... Hmmm maybe Windows 7 simply doesn't like being non-stop for weeks at a time (seldom been a problem before - nonrmally only re-boot this machine every other month). Not sure why its only being ill-behaved for your program so I will continue to monitor and report unusual behaviour.
* * * * *
Just upgraded the video card (from Nvidia 7900gx to ATI 6950 - be interested to see if a change of drivers and more modern graphics changes things. So far all okay - no strange consumption of CPU resource.
Did notice something else unusual - on reboot (with the Canon 400D still powered on and connected) BackyardEOS could take shots but not download them. To fix this I had to power camera off / on, then shut down Canon EOS utility when it restarted on camera detection. Once I ran that cycle all was fine.
Keep me posted Matthew. I'm running a few tests myself. So far 14 hours and still idling with next no memory consumption and CPU is idling between 0% and 1%.
One thing I did notice in your posts... You did note towards the end of your post that you did get an annoying Windows popup window saying that BYE had a problem and needed to shutdown... even though everything seemed to worked fine. This is typical when a Background thread fails... and because it's a background thread the main UI thread continues without a glitch.
One potential source is exiftool (I run exiftool in a background thread). On some system if will simply fail every now and then. In BYE you can opt out of both exif READ and WRITE. Go to SETTINGS -> ADVANCE SETTINGS, and check SKIP EXIF WRITE and try again. See what happens. If this happens again, check SKIP EXIF READ and try again.
If it happens again with both skip exif read and write, send me the log files at backyardeos@yahoo.com. The log files are located in "My Pictures\BackyardTEMP\logs"
Its day two since adding a new videocard and CPU is hovering around 16% with task manager active and BYE taking a evening of long darks.
I added TemperHum that you recommended - it is a delightful little add on!
I also noticed something I meant to pass on - when I click on ASCOM and focuser nothing seems to happen in the focuser box (i.e. it doesn't connect and display the shift focus in or out arrows - until I click on the three dots to the left of the selected focuser "PC.Focuser" and then click okay on its set up box. Once I do this all the focus options appear. Could this just happen automatically down the line - when one selects focuser button - activate it automatically?
Re Exif read / write logs - If I can get the PC to stress out CPU again - I will do that test and send you the resultant logs. Now it's been targeted - watch it behave for a week or two!
BackyardEOS 2.0.2 dated January 8th, 2012 has just been released.
This is a very small incremental service release which addresses just a few minor issues/bugs reported in 2.0.1.
If you have not experienced any issues with 2.0.1 you don't have to upgrade.
But... 2.0.2 also comes with a brand new complete user manual... A big thank you to John Eckert for his contribution in creating this complete manual. Thank you John!
. I may support web cams in the future.
