Apologies for the number typos.
Create an advanced guide tab in the asiair app
Thanks for your feedback, i forwarded to our team.
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I am going to be hated for this but can't resist. Would using Phd2 make more sense at this point instead than waiting forever on a ZWO slow response and their most of the time half working solutions? Break free from the ecosystem guys!
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tempus no one will hate you, lol. I for one really enjoy the "all-in-one" package that is the ASIAir, and the ecosystem makes sense to me. It already uses PHD2. We're just asking for a bit more control.
KC_Astro_Mutt I get the "all in one" point. I just didn't want the "all in one with ONLY ZWO equipment" to end up with inferior controls on the equipment and hardly getting the company's attention on their own forum when requesting better control or requesting a fix for a problem. To each his own I guess.
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tempus I just didn't want the "all in one with ONLY ZWO equipment" to end up with inferior controls on the equipment
Bingo!
All-in-ones and locked ecosystems do work at times -- witness the ecosystem that Apple has built.
However, if you are going to spend a lifetime with this hobby and learn how things work, something like ASIAIR is the last thing you want to use. You learn nothing from it. Just like you learn nothing about photography and optics by using an iPhone.
To pull it off, you also need a company that actually understands astronomy and celestial navigation rather than just cobbling up canned libraries that are created by someone else by just adding their own UI and eye candy.
That is why they cannot answer some questions on this forum because they themselves do not know how things work. In many cases of forum questions being ignored is because they do not know the answer, and too ashamed to admit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Case in point: Local Sidereal Time (and the equinoxes) is taught in the first week of Astronomy 101, and yet the ASIAIR fails even at that, and somehow even conflates Daylight Saving Time into figuring out LST.
Chen
tempus this forum is for requesting features on ZWO devices. I like ZWO devices. I have others. Mini PCs, Raspberry Pi's, etc. I use APT, NINA, PHD2, CPWI, etc. I came to this forum simply to support @Kevin_A 's feature request, because I share that interest. You came, you told everyone how much you don't like ZWO. OK? Don't buy it? Problem solved? LOL. To each his own.
KC_Astro_Mutt. I hope you get what you are hoping for. Truly. Peace.
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dciobota One thing I heard rumored is that the next firmware update will increase the min move from 0.1 pixel to p.2 to solve some guiding issues. This is very bad news for me and others that use small guidescopes to guide larger scopes, especially with strain wave mounts like the am5.
You probably were not around when ASIAIR had defaulted to 0.2 pixel as the MinMo. I found that 0.2 pixel was not appropriate for the RST-135 and sent in the reasoning behind it to Sam (I need to check my email if that was in 2019 or 2020). At that time I also had suggested an Advanced window to expose such adjustments because things like MinMo, LPF, and hysterysis are going to be different for different people. After at least a year, they finally relented and changed it to 0.1 pixel. But they refused to create an Advanced window for fear that it would confuse the typical ASIAIR user.
We will see if they keep being pig headed about Advance windows (not just for guiding but for everything else in ASIAIR).
By the way, to get any real response to a feature request, first establish yourself as a credible technical person, and then write directly to their people. Things posted to this forum get ignored more often than not. I have been sending advices to them (and also gets questions from their developers) for many years now. (Notice the purple lightning bolt in my avatar; I did not put it there :-). The strain wave mount and the dual sensor camera are among my recommendations in just the last couple of years -- ask Sam if you don't believe me, even though I still have reservations that ZWO can pull it off properly without lots more studying.
One suggestion in the last two years that they had absolutely refused to entertain is to use single thin USB-C cable to both power the camera (USB-PD) and transfer data very fast (USB 3.2) with a single light connector (as less problem with gravity). I noticed in the last month that a different manufacturer has started doing just that (and getting blazingly fast frame rates), so they may yet change their mind.
P.S. the reason the 0.2 pixel MinMo is bad for mounts with large periodic error slopes is that, unlike smooth worm geared mounts, is that the 0.1 pixel error is very likely to be a real mount error. It is common for a strain wave gear mount to continue to make more movements that are greater than 0.1 pixels in a long sequence -- as long as the slope remains large for a couple of seconds (not as likely for worm gear mounts).
And, as you said, that 0.2 pixel can correspond to large errors (in arcseconds) when projected to the sky.
If you don't correct that 0.1 pixel right away, by the time you take the next guide frame, it would be 0.2 pixels off by then. It is much better for a strain wave geared mount to make the correction right away before it starts running away from you. Say good bye to guiding better than 0.5".
Not just strain wave geared mounts, but even Avalon recommends a MinMo of zero pixel for the M-zero mount (i.e., always responds to every correction, no matter how small).
The reason for larger MinMo is to avoid correcting rough and noisy gears (often with no belt) in cheap mounts (like avoid correcting wind gusts). Strain wave gears are meshed at multiple places and should not be gitchy.
So, there you go, one more off topic posting in this thread (with apologies to Kevin, who is used to it by now -- you should see some of the exchanges between us on other threads :-). [Hey @Kevin_A , I should have enough parts to do a systemic study of the ZWO fan vibration later this week; lots of different Duro 50 o-rings have already arrived.]
Chen
tempus Thanks!
w7ay start a new thread under cameras regarding the fan vibration as I have a bit to add to it. I want to keep this thread going so we can push for a more user adjustability option for asiair.
I am going to be testing the new minmo change soon as I have the beta and will be pushing in this tread for a advanced tab that should include that option too. I understand it is hard to please everyone all the time but thats life!
Keep up the good work… everyone included!
Kevin_A start a new thread under cameras regarding the fan vibration as I have a bit to add to it.
OK, I thought you were going to start a new thread. If I get some meaningful measurements, I will start one then (or add to your thread if you have started one).
BTW, I believe that unisolated lock nut on the M3 screw is the culprit.
Chen
Lets get back on track here and discuss an advanced tab for better user control… if people so choose. I think it needs to have enough base items included to adjust all mount/ guiding types and broken out so the benefits can realized for both strainwave and worm gear types etc. These would not have to be used and could be greyed out for easy as 123 unless a user toggled an advanced button inside the tab. Then it would be up to a user to use the settings they feel that is best for their mount, oag or guider pixel ratio criteria or focal length/ pixel scale scenarios or just leave everything as is.
Please just add what you want and lets not point any fingers, get off track or such. Lets get this done folks! And if it gets pushed under the rug, then at least we tried!
Cheers Kev
Please list what features are of most concern or relevance in a advanced tab.
Thanks
"But they refused to create an Advanced window for fear that it would confuse the typical ASIAIR user."
ZWO needs to stop treating its customers like they're morons and understand that people use the asiair for many other reasons beyond "I'm brand new to the hobby and don't know anything about the hobby!".
It has a core foundation as it is right now for newcomers, time to open it up a bit more ZWO, though I suspect there's other reasons behind them not giving us more advanced options.
Beyond the ones listed already like minmo what about a way to plate solve and recover after a star is lost? As it stands right now if a cloud drops by and you lose the guide star it's pretty much game over. Your framing is off if and when it reconnects with another guide star.
If not that then at the very least some sort of alert or notification when the guide star is lost.
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Kevin_A Please list what features are of most concern or relevance in a advanced tab.
For auto-guiding:
1) An option to compensate for the slow field rotation of the multi-guide stars (i.e., a slow moving average of the positions of each of "reference" star positions, instead of the fixed position today).
2) An option to use uniform weighting, instead of the fixed Signal-to-Noise based weighting of the multi-star centroids.
3) options to pick the LPF2 and the digital filter options that are already in PHD2, but not used by ASIAIR,
4) option to allow user to use ST4 guiding instead of piulse guiding -- today, if you want to use ST4, you cannot connect ASIAIR to a mount. Some mounts have less latency with ST4 guiding.
5) prepare 50 stars and allow them to be used as substitutes when one or more of the initial pick of stars is/are lost because of clouds. Today, when a star is lost, you simply end up with fewer stars used in centroid averaging. This will also help when you start autoguiding when transparency stars out being poor but then improves, and cause selected stars to start saturating.
6) allow user to select auto setting of the "calibration steps" to get 25 pixel movement since it is a simple function of the guide plate scale and the guide camera pixel size. Even their target audience can benefit from this.
7) allow user to select dark frames (or at least bad pixel map) for different guide cameras (many advance users own more than one guide scope/ guide camera).
8) option to quickly swap main camera/main EAF with the guide camera/guide EAF and transfer the correct focal lengths. Today, to focus a guide camera, you need to manually swap camera, manually swap EAF, and manually enter the correct focal length.
...
Chen