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!
Create an advanced guide tab in the asiair app
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.
- Edited
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
w7ay
Totally agree Chen about the minmo comments.
Back a couple years ago, I didn't pay attention because most of my imaging was at very large image scales with an azgti. As you found out with the rst135, these mounts need to be way more responsive to errors. We'll see if they change it back to 0.2. I truly hope not. I think they're chasing a firmware or hardware issue with the am5 by messing with guiding parameters, which is like treating the symptom, not the root cause. But what do I know.
As to switching back to a PC. Nope, not gonna. Closed ecosystem and all with the asiair, I'm done with windows except post processing. And I hope some day to get that changed also.
As far as the asiair impeding learning about AP, I respectfully disagree on that one. Just like many tout mounts that "disappear" into the background as helping the novice concentrate on the parts of AP that matter, like data gathering, calibrations and so forth, the asiair simplifies workflow. Just line other software does, like NINA for example, but in a much simpler way. While it's nice to learn why polar alignment is important, and reminisce about why we use(d) polar scopes and how, times have indeed changed. Just like cars nowadays. How many of them are manual transmissions? Automation does indeed remove us from direct involvement with the process somewhat, but that doesn't preclude the user from digging in and studying the whys and wherefores on their own.
As for the last thing. I'm beating my head against the wall with that right now. I forgot my am5 hand controller. Some firmware update now requires I turn dst off iny mount which I cannot do here. So I lose an hour of imaging every night while the mount sits around and waits for the real meridian flip to happen. Please zwo, fix this once and for good. Other software can deal with this just fine. It's a shame such a basic thing is still not handled right.
And you may be right. Maybe no one at zwo is paying attention here. But I do see those emails saying they'll look into it. I'm an optimist. Let's put some hope into this. I'm sure zwo doesn't want to start losing customers. I will end up selling my two asiairs for sure if they go back to the 0.2 pixel minmo. As much as I hate windows. And I really, really hate windows. Lol.
w7ay
Chen, I have a feeling many of your requests would require modifying the phd2 core code, and I'd doubt they'd touch that.
I would add what I think Kevin mentioned before, the full gamut of algorithms for Ra and Dec, including ppec. Seems some mounts can really benefit from that one.
I like your idea of an automatic scaling for calculating calibration steps. But that one is tricky, because it depends on the mount guiding speed and pulse time to motor movement translation. I don't know if commanding 1500ms at 1x guide speed translates to the same movement for every mount. It should, but I wonder why phd2 hasn't done the auto thing yet. Must be some reason, otherwise it's dead easy to calculate.
Just my two pennies.
So I have an idea that may make it more palatable for zwo to offer an advanced guiding tab. How about adding it as an experimental feature? Like they did with the plate solves and such. It will only show if you selected that option.
Just spitballimg.
12 days later
They really do need to put and advanced tab or to keep the 1,2,3 people happy… add an experimental tab with a lot of these missing basic guiding parameters offered to non 1,2,3 people.
I just finished trying out the “fix” beta release download zwo sent me to try for the asiair with the 0.2 minmo change and my mount was the worst I have ever seen last night guiding between 0.8 and 1.3 rms and it was jagged. Luckily my scope was my FRA300 with my 533 so my image scale covered it up fairly well. Asiair guiding was good, bad, good, bad. Much worse than before and no fix for the inconsistant guiding. It is funny but changing durations and aggressions did not seem to do anything but smooth it out for 60s then crap would spike up again then good again but not at any regularity. I reverted back to the latest non fix minmo firmware.
- Edited
Kevin_A I just finished trying out the “fix” beta release download zwo sent me to try for the asiair with the 0.2 minmo change and my mount was the worst I have ever seen last night guiding between 0.8 and 1.3 rms and it was jagged.
Why am I not surprised?
Increasing the MinMo for a mount that has a large error slope delays needed correction, pretending it does not exist, like sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich, instead of trying to correct the mount error right away.
Consider this: instead of correcting a 0.1" slope error, it waits for the error to build to 0.2". At that point, while the slope error is still only 0.1") ASIAIR issues a correction pulse of 0.2". This is nuts.
Chen
Kevin_A my fear is that they impliment this in the next release of asiair.
No problem. Just switch to INDIGO Sky (if you use Raspberry Pi or Mac laptop) or N.I.N.A. (if you use a Windows laptop).
The nice thing with INDIGO is that you can implement any idea that you want.
If you want to stick to ASIAIR, you'll need to use a guide scope with a longer focal length to compensate for the larger MinMo. (Just think -- the folks using 120mm focal length "guide scopes" would be really hung out to dry.) A 500mm-ish focal length guide scope should do it, albeit you may not be able to push the camera gain to get 20 dB beyond 12 stars.
This is crazy, since it took me two years to convince Sam that the RST-135 (ditto Avalon M-zero, but especially RST-135) needed 0 MinMo. So they changed from 0.2 pixels to 0.1 pixels. Now they are going to change it back and ruin all the strain wave mounts out there, including their own. (Just when I now know how to tune the ASIAIR to get 0.35" total RMS consistently with my RST-135e. 0.4" total with an RST-135 that has the relative encoder instead of absolute encoder.) Their funeral, not my decision to worry about -- I can experiment with my own autoguide code by using INDIGO.
Chen