Hi - whilst Rodolphe and I primarily envisaged the AStarBox being used for portable setups, he encouraged me to use one for my remote scope at Astrocamp in Nerpio, Spain.
I've been using it for about a month there now, and it has exceeded my expectations, despite being one of the founders of AStarBox.
Firstly, it is a lot faster than my old laptop (admittedly about 12 years old) and there are no constant demands from Windows to update. There are no Dell packages eating up the RAM and imaging without windows is a pleasure. When you do update the packages, this generally does not involve rebooting.
Secondly, I now have much finer control over supplying power to my devices. Whilst Astrocamp provides a web accessible power switch for my equipment, this is an all or nothing affair. Every time I rebooted my laptop I had problems connecting to my Atik EFW which meant I had to turn off the power for everything to get it running. Now on the rare occasions that I have to reboot my AStarBox (and this is normally because I'm testing something out - more on this below), I can simply turn the power off for the filterwheel beforehand, reboot, turn the power back on and all connects properly. I don't have to wait for my Paramount to rehome when I use it. Much cleaner.
I also discovered that the Pi has a hardware watchdog timer. I hadn't come across this before, but essentially it is a hardware counter. If not reset by software every 15 seconds, the Pi will reboot, whatever the cause. I have now added a service to the Pi which on starting the Pi will launch The Sky, park my mount to make sure all is safe and then send me an email to let me know. I'm considering adding the ability to relaunch the imaging run which should be straight forwards. Rebooting to test this out is what I referred to above.
Finally, it gave me the opportunity to test a Python script that controlled the imaging with The Sky. This had worked well with an OSC rig in my garden, but I hadn't tested it with a filter wheel. This has also worked very well. It is robust to clouds, the observatory roof closing and even failures in the code. If this happens, the mount is automatically parked and an email sent. I now have access to the observatory weather station and the final step is to include this in the code.
I also tried using Stellarmate to control the equipment. This works well too and has a much wider range of equipment that it can connect to than The Sky X, but I'm much more familiar with The Sky so am sticking with that.
Let me know if you'd like more information.
Colin
