Local Native and ASCOM driver support for the Air Cameras

IXAF97iy

I own the 2600MC Air, the 2600MM Air and the ASI 585MC Air. Great cameras but utterly useless for advanced astrophotography because they only support the super slow ASCOM Alpaca camera connection over HTTP REST when using software such as NINA, SharpCap, etc. It’s frankly ridiculous that you can have a camera literally connected to your mini pc via USB which supports lightning fast transfer speeds, but instead you have to access the camera and images via super high latency HTTP network access.

Please fix!

paulitoweb

IXAF97iy I also quote this request.
Paolo

fgbarr

I use Sharpcap and would like to continue to use it on my new Asi2600MC Air. Do ZWO intent to develop a native drive to use it like Asistudio? Ascom/Alpaca is very slow.

fgbarr

I Want to know if ZWO has a plan to develop a native drive to access Asi2600 Air from Windows like Asistudio does, using Sharpcap, Nina or others good apps.

SteveD

OK, so I'm having the same issue. Is there a plan to correct this?

Corsair

SteveD did you resolve this based on your post here: https://bbs.zwoastro.com/d/19164-asi2600mc-air-alpaca-nina/40 ?

SteveD

Yes, so my issue was forgetting the MCAIR automatically connected the camera when it was powered on. I had to disconnect the camera in the ASI AIR APP, then I was able to connect to the 2600MCAIR Camera in NINA. This is still accomplished via station mode, not physical USB connection since this appears to be the only way to connect on the AIR cameras.

Talking with some Cloudy Night folks it seems like the built in guide camera is not able to be connected at the same time. It's one camera or the other, so I guess you would need a separate guide camera if you wanted to use MCAIR camera and Nina for imaging.

464

SteveD that unfortunate if it stays that way. I had every intention of using this as you are, but am finding a litany of issues so far. I would even use the asiair app if either ZWO or paramount would get back to me on actual instructions to make the connection to the mount work.

Then there's the PA issue where the asiair app reports a near perfect alignment (based on the numbers) and yet Tpoint is saying that the mount is grossly out of alignment (confirmed by sharpcap as well)
At this point it's looking like my one camera dream solution is exactly that, a dream, or nightmare depending on the day I'm trying to get things to work.

Corsair

464
OK. So I didn't know what TPoint, or their products like Paramount, was. I did a search and read. Wow. If you're spending that kind of money on that kind of equipment and software I really don't think the ASIAIR is what you need.
That's at minimum a mini-pc at the scope setup or just complete computer control by a decent desktop/laptop.
Which you would be able to control remotely quite easily as well.

464

Corsair I have a PC connected to it already, that's not an issue. What I wanted to do is simplify a little and remove a dedicated guider from the setup as it makes switching from my Edge 9.25 to the Rasa 8 easier. The idea of a Main Camera and guide camera all in one just appealed to me. The the built in air is just an extra if you will. A poor do on my part for not fully researching if there were any issues with connection. The lack of proper documentation should have been a red flag, but alas...

The main issue is that the ALPACA connection is rather hit and miss, and the slow speed of it is what's causing bottlenecks in the system, causing camera timeouts, hence why I'm open to using the "air " function. Pity that you can't just have everything run off the USB cable.

@Tech@ZWO any wisdom you can throw this way or the thread that I started on this a couple of days ago?

rMxn5EDL

did you resolve this based on your post here: https://bbs.zwoastro.com/d/19164-asi2600mc-air-alpaca-nina/40 block blast 19164-asi2600mc-air-alpaca-nina/40 ?
Thanks for this sharing