I’ve been trying to get away from my laptop for imaging for some time now. I’ve been using S-mate for just over a week on my rPix3b+. So far so good.

I’ve been fiddling with the image and focus sections. I’ve noticed some quirks when using my canon t3 and t6i. Ive checked the forums for possible workarounds but haven’t found anything solid. If these are repeats please let me know.

I updated to the latest build today before posting to make sure I was at the latest and greatest.

Focus in and out buttons don’t work reliably with an auto focus lens attached. Prior to updating it work sometimes. After the update the only time it will work is when the camera is in video mode. It would be nice if the video window could be separated or detachable from the KSTars window. Or possibly have the focus buttons on the video window.

Autofocus button is no longer working after the latest update. It was working unreliability before.

The time it takes to get the image from the camera to the rPi is long. At the highest resolution using raw as the image format it has taken up to a minute. It would be nice if there was a don’t download option. Once I get frame and focus downloading to the rPi isn’t important. I can just image to the sdcard in the camera.

If I set the image size to small jpeg it only takes a couple of seconds. It would be nice If there was a option to adjust image size/quality in the focus and image tabs. It would reduce the download lag while framing and focusing.

The ekos profiles don’t allow for different settings for the same camera. I tried to setup a high Rez and low Rez profile to quickly switch settings.

My two cents. Thanks for all the work on this platform.

Hi,

I will not comment on the Auto focus issue but the download issue is your USB cable and/or Network strength. A good quality and short USB cable works best - if you are in the UK Lindy sell Cromo range which work well IMHO. If you Network strength is poor (5ghz or 2.4ghz) or you are using 2.4ghz and are getting interference your downloads will be slow - "you are only as far as your slowing component"

Using my Canon 100d connected to RPI and using RAW images (they are about 25mb on full res) it takes approx 6 secs to download and appear in the viewer window. If you use FITS they are about 35MB and appear in approx 10sec. Dont forget for FITS there is conversion involved to get FITS plus if have you got Auto Debayering etc checked in InDdi this adds to the time before the image appears.

Plus Dont use "Compression" it doesn't help.

You can and do have the option in Indi to save the image on the SD only with no download but honestly I would just choose Download only option and not use the save on SD Card to help save the odd 1 sec or 2

Hope that helps

I was doing more testing with different cables and found there was something other than cables slowing me down. I was not shooting Raw and Native as I thought.

There is a disconnect between the Indi Control Panel -Stars Image Settings(Screen that pops open on Connect) and the Ekos -KStars CCD and Filter wheel settings window. In Indi Control Panel Image Settings Tab Capture was set to RAW and Transfer Format is set to Native. I didn't notice this does not affect the capture format in the CCD & Filter wheel tab. Or Maybe they have different meanings that I do not understand. I am still on the left side of the learning curve.

My transfer speeds, when set to native in the correct tab, are similar to yours. 6 seconds or 7 depending on if I have the save to SD option. I have pulled the fits speeds down to about 30 seconds by adjusting different options. I am still "tweaking" the settings to reduce the fits transfers. For comparison, My image files are 31Mb in cr2 format and 48mb in fits.

I have been using the 16Gb SanDisk Ultra SDHC. I found a way to benchmark them in the rPi using this website listed below. it seems the SD bus is limited to around 21MBps. it mentions some overclocking options that I am going to explore with a new SanDisk Extream SDXC I just picked up.

www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/microsd-cards

in Ekos, native means whatever format your camera sends it will take in. So your camera format can be JPG, TIFF, CR2, or whatever.. it would not attempt to convert this if it was sent to native. For FITS, it will convert any sources to FITS as the name suggests.

I use one of these but 32gb version www.picstop.co.uk/microsd-sdhc/sandisk-u...or-android-16gb.html.

The pictures I provided were from a test RPI running off an old 32gb USB stick with an even older 16gb boot SDHC card but the timings are about the same on my "production" system.

Obviously the file sizes are dependent on res of your camera hence the discrepancy.

Still not bad for a £32 board

I hadn't realised the obvious ,as pointed out by KRNO (thanks) , that it depends on you actual camera settings - I am used to software being able to change this (which would be nice for a future version of Indi Canon driver )

I've brought it up once before as a suggestion to add an option to the align and focus modules to change the image format to jpg just for those processes. But it did not get much traction. Sounds like you are interested in something similar Stash.

Yes but only because I was spoilt by APT but that had full access to Canon SDK - this is reverse engineered stuff but I believe the last time I looked at GPHOTO it could change to download image type

Plus online Platesolve has the option to convert image to JPG ????

I’ve been tweaking multiple options in the rPi3b+ for performance. I finally settled for just overclocking the sdcard by modifying the /boot/config.txt file. I have shaved the image transfer speed down to 3-4 seconds from 5-6 seconds when shooting RAW, NOT saving to SDcard and transfering native. When transferring fits I’m down to 17 seconds from 28.

Overall performance of the pie has increased as well. Opening KSTars has gone from watching it load slowly to almost instant. Switch screens or opening menu is snappy and responsive.

Overclocking anything can cause stability issues so do this at you own risk. I manage to brick my pie more than once before i finally figured it out.

If you place the RPI near to your scope lens if will keep the dew at bay LOL

KRNO...
I am a little confused with your response and what I am seeing between the focus screen and the capture screen. When I capture native with the camera settings set to native, no save to sdcard and RAW I transfer to the pie in 3-4 seconds for each image. The image size is 31mb. When I switch the capture type to fits in the capture screen it transfers in about 17 seconds. The image size is 48 mb. I understand there is a lot more going on when it is converted to fits. With a file size 150% larger than the raw file and the conversion process this seems reasonable.

Here is what’s confusing me with the focus screen. It takes roughly the same amount of time to capture for framing and focus as the fits capture not the native capture. In addition the only way to enlarge it is to view it isn the fits viewer. It seems like the image created from this screen is getting converted to fits.

Am I missing something about the focus screen? Should the focus screen be in native format? Can it be in native mode?

A joke about overclocking - increases heat - rpi3b+ gets hot anyway - dont worry about it - my dry sense of humour

Fits used anywhere in Indi when using DSLR is a convertion - I think Focus/Align all use FITS format and there is no way to use Native format. Align does then convert images to JPG when uploading to Online solver - if you tick the box. As I say a guess on whats happening !