Multiple ASIair's simultaneously

hdastro

Awaiting new ASIair to be delivered but in the meantime, I have this question:

Seeing that the software is locked down, from what I have read, I assume the configurations cannot be changed inside the Raspberry Pi as well.

If so, I see no way as how I would be able to use 2 ASIair's with 2 telescopes(LX-200 Classic and ES ED 102 APO) using 2 different mounts (Meade SuperWedge and Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro) in parallel, or am I mistaken, seeing that the proxy address is pointing to 10.0.0.1, Port 4030 on both units?

If I remember correctly, no 2 devices can share the same IP address.

Is this the case with the ASIair or has someone found a way to use 2 units simultaneously either by attaching to an existing Network thru DHCP and the other as a Static Proxy server possibly?

Thx in advance and looking forward to getting the new unit and working with it.

Cal

tcampbell

This would be a nice feature/enhancement request.

I brought up a similar question to Sam a while back. I wanted to have the ASIair join my phone's hot-spot network instead of me having make my phone join the ASI's network. Sam said the reason they didn't want to do that is because there is no hardware reset button on the device (on the Raspberry Pi) so if someone botches the config ... resetting it basically means wiping the microSD card and re-installing from a backup (and hopefully people actually made a backup -- I suspect many people do not.)

I considered that a possible solution is to use the hardware ethernet port to create a terminal session that doesn't require a login. For those familiar with a stock Raspberry Pi running the Rasbian OS ... there's a utility called 'rasps-config'. It's a simple text-terminal menu (no graphics) with configuration choices. I'm thinking ZWO could do something similar to this ... a few configuration options displayed on a terminal menu and also a factory-reset option just in a user can't remember what they did to it.

ZWO could create an account that can only be accessed via that port (it would be insecure to allow it to use WiFi) to display simple options such as letting you change the WiFi network name, password, choose to "join" an existing WiFi vs. make it's own WiFi ... or a menu option to perform a factory-reset of the ASIair settings.

With this ... you could configure one ASIair to create a WiFi network, and the other to join the same WiFi network so that you'd have two (or more) on the same network.

The trickier bit is that the client software that runs on your phone/tablet would need to be updated to display the list of all ASIairs that I can see.

So it's all do-able ... but the question is how many users would take advantage of this feature and should it be prioritized over other feature/enhancement requests (like polar alignment)?

Clear Skies,

Tim