I ordered an ASI178MM. It's a dual purpose camera: 1) it will be used as a guidecam for my AstroTrac portable setup; and 2) it will be used for solar/lunar/planetary imaging. Just discovered this forum and I'm a bit worried about:
1) Computer. My portable setup uses a small, headless PC (In Focus Kangaroo) which only has 2GB of memory and a 32GB eMMC HD, plus a 64GB MicroSD card for additional storage. When this Mini PC is used, the ASI178MM would be mostly used for guiding. Will this be sufficient? It does have a USB3 port which I plan to use with this camera. It runs Windows 10 Home. Full specs are here:
Kangaroo Mobile Desktop Computer KJ2B#001-NA Intel Atom X5-Z8500 (1.44 GHz) 2 GB LPDDR3 32 GB eMMC Windows 10 Home.
2) Drivers. For guiding with the above MiniPC I would be using PHD2 and my AstroTrac with Autoguide port. Would I just connect the native driver to PHD and "On Camera" for the mount? Or would I need to use one of the ASCOM Drivers (presumably the one with ST4 support)?
For the most part when I'm using the ASI178MM for solar/lunar/planetary I will be at in my backyard observatory attached to an i7 quad core 8GB laptop. Again, would I just use the native driver with something like Firecapture? Or would I need to use the ASCOM driver (presumably the one without ST4 support since I will be using a different guidecam on my observatory scopes.
Finally, what if I wanted to use something like Firecapture to do say solar with my AstroTrac. Would the MiniPC be sufficient to capture solar/lunar/planetary via USB3 but with only 2GB RAM and a 32GB eMMC HD? The processor is only an Intel Atom x5.
Will I be able to do what I'm planning? Should I be worried about all the problems with drivers expressed on this forum?
...Keith
