ASIAIR v2.4.2 has been released!: Page 14

ASIAIR v2.4.2 has been released!

Sonixx

From the posts above it seems there are only very isolated problematic cases where the root cause of problems is unknown.
For the vast majority of people the current stable version just seem to work fine.

While this does not help our friends who have indeed real issues, in the grand scheme of things the ASIAIR is a great product which just works for tens of thousands of users. Nobody else to this day came close offering a similar package.

After all the recent ZWO bashing I think we should stop for a moment and appreciate the team behind the the Asiair. That hopefully will continue improving and innovating ( and have a more rigid testing regime).

Thanks for listening,

Stephan

franco

Sonixx is it too much to ask that a commercial product does what it claims to do?

Sonixx

Hi Franco,

Of course you can expect what has been promised. I am basically using all the features of the ASIAIR, except planetary imaging, and everything works reliably.

And it seems that it is the same for most people. Some people have issues, but I feel this is just a small number and I hope their problems are worked on by ZWO.

Since the really sh.. release, I feel much of the bashing is just for bashing sake. ZWO apologised and the situation seem to have improved for most.

What kind of issues are you experiencing with the latest regular release under which circumstances ?

People who have issues must have something in common, hence my post a few days earlier.

There were not many responses with actual issues, bit maybe one source of problem could be a too narrow field of view.

franco

Sonixx what ZWO did was provide a way to link together a bunch of disparate open source software in a exquisite tiny red CNC aluminium box and allow you to control it all from your phone - brilliant! The early versions could be forgiven for being a bit rough around the edges but several years on, nothing much has changed in terms of reliability. Just because it happens to work for you doesn't mean the people for whom it doesn't work, should remain silent.

gm6wS8xS

One reason I was so quiet – the bad weather – there was no opportunity to test extensively.
I had the opportunity to test the Asiair 2600MC and Asiair+ with IOS 2.4.4 Testflight over two nights.
Plate solving has, as far as I can tell, become significantly better and faster.
Meridian Flip is working again.
But since there's no changelog for both, it's difficult to make a statement after two nights.
How are you supposed to test then?

It wouldn't be a problem if the communication was working.

magore

I thought I would take time to report that I am NOT having any of the recent reported problems as of Oct 8th. I have been doing multi-target imaging with plate solve and all works fine.

The only thing I did not test recently was allsky polar alignment which in the past (as of a month ago) was failing depending on what part of the sky I used for stars. Specifically when using a few overhead quadrants split by the meridian and prime vertical polar alignment used to fail with rising errors. FYI I always avoided areas near the lines themselves avoided crossing them. Testing all of these areas is time consuming. For example NE directions worked. SE did not.

On Oct I used my asiair plus with am5 mount, zwo filter wheel, zwo Asi290mm guider asi294mc camera. zwo focuser. AM5 firmware was up to date as was my asiair plus.

Corsair

magore good to hear it.

What are you using to run the ASIAIR App by the way?

magore

Corsair
I am using a Google pixel 6 running android 16.

fA426YZQ

franco The problem is not the ASIAir in general. The problem is when you push the limits of anything (Car, Airplane and yes the ASIAir), you will encounter difficult to solve issues that do not offer great return on the work involved to solve them. The typical engineering problem, 90% of issues are easy, 10% of issues are really difficult.

When the FOV is very small, the indexes for plate solving get very large. For 8' - 11', they are 1.5 GB and for 2.0' - 2.8' they are around 13.5 GB. Consider that the 'disk' size is 32 GB for a lot of these units, it does not leave much space. I believe luxo's scope has a relatively tight FOV.

The Raspberry Pi 4B (for the pro series) is very slow and memory limited. Even the Raspberry Pi 5 does not get much better. Plate solving tight FOV is going to be very slow and regularly time-out. The Raspberry Pi and as a consequence, the ASIAir just does not have the horse power needed for tight FOV plate solving. There are also very few stars in the FOV and the contrast and other options are used for typically planetary or lunar imaging makes plate solving even worse as fewer stars are often visible. Once plate solving is broken, meridian flip and polar alignment are also dicey.

Lastly, you design for the average and cover as wide of a range as possible. The ASIAir is not a perfect astrophotography solution. It is a very good one, providing a great astrophotography suite at a very inexpensive price and allowing for very low power requirements. If the ASIAir is not sufficient for what someone is using it for, then their only option is to get something that is sufficient. There are others out there but having the simple menu integration that ZWO has done, I doubt you will find one that is inexpensive and as easy to use. These generally use a full-up computer and not a lightweight arm computer and use direct or VNC connection.

There is a difference between being silent and having unreasonable expectations. I do not expect my Subaru to perform demanding off-road driving like a Jeep does. It can do some but is definitely not the ideal solution and I need to limit my expectations of what it can do. This product is an inexpensive device that offers the ability to control astrophotography sessions very well. It is also easy to use even for a beginner. Other products offer a lot more capability but at the cost of simplicity.

Luxo

Nope that is not the issue with the platesolving.

With 4 hours of dark last night with some buddies, we lined up 4 ASIAirs with 2.4.2 (iOS) and 2.4.3 (Android) installed. The rigs ranged from a RedCat 51 on an AM3 to an Esprit 120 on an AM5, all with EAF. Cameras were ASI1600 and ASI2600MM (the RedCat was shooting mono with narrowband filters).

All could polar align OK.
Autofocus was OK.
GOTO with plate solve is interesting - but it is broken.
What happens is that it slews to the target, executes a first plate-solve, then moves somewhere near the target and no further moves occur. Platesolving however continues to take frames, and never finishes because the mount doesn't move exactly onto the target, where as ASI2.3.3 does move exactly;y onto the target.

This is close enough for those with little refractors to think its all good, but the Esprit 120 confirmed what I experienced - watch closely and its only makes one attempt at moving the mount after the first plate solve.

The only positive note was the plate solve is much faster.

Autoguiding was a mixed bag. On the little rigs it worked but on the Esprit 120 it did not, it starts, multi-star guiding starts, but after a few minutes it loses stars and sits there showing GUIDING in green text, but its not actually guiding - the mount was tracking blind. Again, little rigs could get away with this and never notice, but on a longer focal length it becomes quite obvious.

Rolled all four back to 2.3.3 in preparation for the next two weekends.

Corsair

Luxo
I'm assuming none of them had "New Plate Solve" selected under experimental features in the about section?

And you're saying the plate solve issue was present for people on both Android App 2.4.3 and Apple App 2.4.2 ?

What. version of the Android OS and what model Android devices are they using?

What version of iOS/iPadOS and what model Apple device are they using?

Can you also test what happens when you only have the absolute minimum connected when using 2.4 3 / 2 4.2?

I.e. OTA, mount, main camera only

Disconnect from the ASIAIR and/or cameras any CAA, EAF, EFW, etc.

So the only thing would be:
Power in to ASIAIR
camera to usb 3.0 port
Mount to usb 2.0 port
Nothing or only one power out to camera

Don't do autofocus routines, guiding, etc etc.

So you'll have to manually focus the OTA (very it roughly or as close to focused before polar alignment).

With that setup and after Polar Alignment succeeds do this:
Open Mount Settings > select go home. Check it returns to Home position.
Open Mount Settings > select Sync Mount.

Now, while in Preview Mode, choose a Bright Star to Go To in order to manually refine focus. See if you have success in platesolving, centring, and enabling Mount tracking to stay on target.

If it works - go to focus mode and use a bahtinov mask to refine focus.

Once achieved, go to Mount Settings > Go Home then Mount Settings > Sync Mount.

Now see if you can Go To a target.

magore

Corsair
Ok. More details
I was not using New plate solve and not using All sky

Corsair

A few general things I found is really important in general
1 - calibrate focuser backlash!
2 - focus guidescope
3 - calibrate guidescope tracking
4 - adjust guide scope exposure and gain together. Faster for strainwave like AM5 sauce as 0.5 seconds
5 - make sure plate solve exposure is good enough for the filters you use
6 - if your having WiFi issues use an app like WiFi Analyzer on Android to see what channel your on and how congested it is. (The last time I checked ZWO was using WiFi country code CN which restricts WiFi channel possibilities to 1 channel in most areas. I hacked mine via ssh to my country CA and added several other WiFi profiles I use when traveling)

Luxo

Corsair - weather has turned ugly again, could be 10 days to the next clear evening, they’re rare.

Need a planetarium to test this stuff properly. And there isn’t one in my city.

Corsair

Luxo
Can't recall but are you Southern or Northern Hemisphere?

I'm Southern Hemisphere (in Australia, about 1-2 hours south of Sydney, NSW). Weather has definitely taken a turn today (very strong winds).

Luxo

Northern Sydney. Member of NSAS and BMAS. You'll find me on CN easily enough...

malc

I last reported 13 days ago that v. 2.4.3 on Android phone app now appeared to be working for me. I’ve since had 3 further imaging sessions where everything has now functioned perfectly. I’ve tried 2 telescopes, a RedCat 61 (300mm) and a Tak FSQ106 (530mm) with ASIAIR2600MM Air Duo and ASIAIR2600MC Air Duo cameras, the MM with a narrowband HIII filter and the MC with an Optolong L-extreme filter. Mount is an ap1200gto. As I reported last time, what made the change from non functioning to working appears to be the Guide settings, amending from the default 2000 for all three, to:

Callibration Step 600
Max DEC Duration 450
Max RA Duration 450

I’ve also had no problem with plate solving tho haven’t used the "new plate solve".

Luxo

Ok… I’m not surprised platesolving would appear to work for you with that combination - using a premium mount which is balanced implies it will be on target within a minutes or two of arc, and short focal lengths.

It’s a whole different ballgame at 3000mm. While my CW350 does GOTO quite well an error of a few arc min is very obvious, whereas on your scopes you’d never notice.

Yet version 2.3.3 nails the target every time to arc seconds.

franco

Luxo it's a bit hard to understand why plate solving would change between versions, the Air calls out to the astrometry.net programs to find stars and then run the solver using the pre installed index files. It's one of the reasons that the OS image is so big, the Air has to cater for all FOVs unlike something like Ekos which lets you pick and choose which ones to load. I'm in sunny Perth by the way.

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