Yesterday was 1st light for my RPi3b+ and Astroberry.
I was able to Goto, autofocus, platesolve, guide and capture
But when I decided to enable the 'Auto Debayer' in Kstars, so after displaying the next FITS in color, Kstars/Ekos crashed (retried many times to confirm).
Is there another setting that need tweaking? My camera is a ASI294MC; FITS files size
are 22MB.
Maybe I can display the FITS images only locally on my Windows laptop in order not to overload the Pi?
I did not realised that debayering was such an intensive process!
After reviewing, specifications of the ASI294MC, memory storage is the responsibility of the OS. No buffer exists on the device. The RPI3B+ and any RPI lower models are resource limited. RPI4B has more, but is limited.
I keep Task Man running to watch memory consumption. I would think that adding an USB storage device to manage threads of content creation is required for such options.
This is from KSTARS under FITS.
“The right panel lists processing options. The Auto Stretch item is to always apply auto stretch to images in FITS Viewer, Limited Resources Mode is to enable limited resource mode to turn off any resource-intensive operations, namely: Auto Debayer (bayered images will not be debayered; only grayscale images are shown), Auto WCS (World Coordinate System data will not be processed; WCS maps sky coordinates to image coordinates; equatorial grid lines, object identification, and telescope slew within an image are disabled), and 3D Cube (RGB images will not be processed; only grayscale images are shown). You can switch off some of these resource-greedy operations separately as well.”
This says Auto Debayer is one example of resource-intensive operations. To me, separate competitive operations onto non-OS volumes. Content creation is competing with with OS and KSTARS operations. I would separate the content creation. If Auto Debayering helps, then minimize the numbers of applications running, and increase memory for video. Video memory is shared with the OS. 1G is all there is.
Changing the focus to a USB drive allows the OS to be just the OS. Adding high speed USB drives allows the processing to operate faster.
Consider adding a USB drive.
Add more more to video in discrete amounts
Turn off Auto Stretch
Thanks for the info.
I have tried yesterday running in client-server approach: My Windows laptop is running Kstars/Ekos, and the RPi3B+ runs the INDI server.
Of course, Debayer & streched FITS are displayed without any issues on the laptop.
The main drawback of client-server approach for Astrophotography is if one the two computers crash, or the network, then everything stops.
But i'm considering upgrading to a RPi4B with 4GB of RAM. It's still a cost effective solution I think compared to leaving a laptop outside or Embedded PC $$$.