After a while gathering all the parts I need, I’ve finally got the board together. I’m just waiting on a few connectors and then I can program and test it. Hopefully this will be working within a week. I probably also have enough parts to make one or two more.
I’ve been working on another project recently that’s now ready for others to use. It’s a new driver for the Raspberry PI HQ camera to allow it to be used in NINA or other ASCOM compatible devices. The driver itself runs on your Raspberry Pi and communicates with your PC remotely using ASCOM Alpaca. This is built into your ASCOM platform so there’s nothing extra to install on the PC side. Once the driver is running on your Raspberry Pi, you can open the ASCOM chooser (e.g. via ASCOM Diagnostics), go to the Alpaca tab and enable Alpaca discovery. This should find your Raspberry Pi and offer to install it on your PC. Once this is done, you can use it in NINA, Sharpcap, PHD2, etc as you would any other ASCOM device.
The driver supports binning, subframes, gain, and exposure. It’s pretty good performance-wise too but bear in mind that each frame from the HQ camera is 24MB. If you’re connected with Wifi or Fast Ethernet, just the file transfer time will be almost 2.5seconds. It will probably be better on a modern Pi with gigabit ethernet or faster wifi. If you’re going to use this as a guide cam, turn on binning and consider using subframes. It’ll never be fast enough for planetary, but I wrote this for DSO
If you want to use it, you can clone my git repo, install the dependencies and run it with “python app.py”.
This driver was made possible by the ASCOM AlpycaDevice Python SDK and the Picamera2 libcamera SDK.
I managed to get the guiding working REAL well and the sky was clear, so I let it rip on the North America Nebula for about 2hrs whilst I got on with some coding. I noticed that it started to go slightly off focus towards the end of the evening so even more reason for me to complete this auto-focus project. Anyway, I’m happy with the framing but it needs much more data to get rid of the noise.
The PCB’s have arrived from JLCPCB. They look top quality! So far, I can highly recommend them. The order process was simple and the price was even better. More components in the post including the stepper motor so hopefully they’ll arrive soon.
I managed to get an hour of exposure time on the Eastern Veil Nebula in the constellation of Cygnus last night. I’m relatively happy with the end result but it’s quite noisy. I think I might revisit this at some point in the future and gather some more data.
