There's got to be something I'm doing wrong: The live view in my rig has about a 15 second delay, rendering it all but useless for manually focusing my Canon T31/600D. Preview during a sequence slows the system to a crawl as it sops shooting while the preview image is being transferred. I run two RPIs distributed, one for the Canon camera, the second for guide cam and mount control. The guide cam is plugged into a powered USB hub, which is plugged into my "guide PI". The mount (iOptron iEQ45 Pro) is also plugged directly into the guide PI. The Canon is plugged directly into the second, "camera PI". These two PIs (both running Stellarmate OS) are configured and controlled over a dedicated WIFI, by a Win 7 laptop running Kstars/Ekos. Ekos see's the pair of PIs as one - the distributed networking seems to work perfectly once you have everything configured and the SSH command syntax worked out correctly. To speed up sequences, I have preview images turned off because the system doesn't shoot while a preview image is being transferred to Ekos on the laptop, thus leaving me blind.

I'm SO close to getting this rig up 100% and I've spent the last six months learning Kstars/Ekos, but this problem has me stumped and feeling crippled when using Indi/Kstars/Ekos. Obviously, being able to focus is fundamental and required for success. It's also nice to see the shots as they are taken, but not if it means there's a one minute pause between frames while the preview transfers over the network.

How are people focusing manually using Ekos? Am I doing something wrong? Is there a network setting I may have set incorrectly slowing down the network (I use a dedicated network router, not connected to the Internet, used only for my AP rig) or something on the RPI or in Ekos?

What FPS are you getting with this? It appears that the transfer rate is not fast enough to keep with the acquisition rate?

There is a setting in "Streaming" tab called Divisor. If you set it to 2, it will skip every other frame and this might help a bit. You can play with this until you get an acceptable balance between acquisition and transfer rates.

Thanks Jasem, I'll give it a try on my next evening out and let you know if it helps.

I discovered the problem with slow live video was the Encoder setting under the Streaming tab. When I switch the Encoder to MJPEG
(RAW was the default) I can get a good 14-15 frames per second which is good, so problem solved for live video and hopefully focusing. Now I need to get around the slow previewing during a sequence. With preview on, there's about a 45-60 second delay between shots as the preview image is transferred over the WiFi to my laptop, which wastes too much valuable imaging time. With preview off, one shot is taken right after another in quick succession but then I'm blind - which is no good either. I have yet to find a work-around or solution. Any tips are appreciated.

Thanks for posting werper, same challenge here, I will look into MPEG for,streaming, I had assumed that was the default behaviour, so good to know.

I originally assumed my problem 9th previews was a USBthrouput problem but upgrading to a RPi 4 did nothing to help, I was starting to think it was my home wifi but maybe it’s an Emo’s thing?

Just to add to this - I've made two changes since the last post, both of which appear to have helped enormously;
1). changed streaming settings to MPEG in the driver
2). hard wired the RPi4 Ethernet into my DLink 1665 access point in client mode - effectively still using my WiFi network but with a high quality signal - absolutely huge difference

If you're an RPi user I strongly recommend ditching the built in WiFi and going with an Ethernet umbilical (of get a better antenna) - especially true of the RPi4 which seems to suffer from signal strength issues, more so if you are using an aluminium case to help with cooling as I am

I am also seeing a low frame rate. However, in my case changing the format from RAW to MPEG in the Streaming section of the Camera properties didn't seem to make any difference. When I do a 'live video" from the "CCD" tab I get between 0.7 and 1.1 FPS regardless of RAW or MPEG. Clearly MPEG is a lot less data so I am suspecting there is something else at play in my settings/setup?
I am using an ASI071 MC-Cool Camera. Do I need to bring the resolution down? I guess the fact that the FPS didn't seem to change at all between RAW and MPEG makes me think I have something else incorrect?

Btw, does KStars have a button/option where you can simply check the throughput rate to the Stellarmate. It would be nice to know the comms speed over WIFI from my MacBook (running Kstars) to the Stellarmate. VNC seems quick and there is no obvious lag there, so using that as a reference for speed would indicate that I should be getting enough throughput for a few FPS from the Camera?

the best solution I have found to date is to Bin or Sub-frame heavily and use the Looped setting - I've not found a way to get Framerates anywhere near acceptable unless I am running locally and even then it's not super fast.

I like the idea of a bandwidth test function!

I just tested with connecting to remote StellarMate (running SM OS v1.5.3) over WiFi and it gave decent FPS considering this is over WiFi.

Thanks for checking Jassem - let me go back and re-check, it may have been my setup back then.

Hello Jasem,

Are the streaming properties available via the Stellarmate Android app?

I set up my mount for every session, and its polar alignment routine requires me to see live view through the OTA while standing at the scope. Currently I use a Canon DSLR and can view the image on the back of the camera. But I am considering purchasing a dedicated astro camera that does not offer this. It is a very expensive purchase, so I am trying to make sure I will be able to see the live image for polar alignment.

I did some testing with my current DSLR and the app, and can get a sufficient frame rate. However, I do not know whether this will be true for the new camera without adjusting the streaming properties. I cannot find a way to set those in the app.

If I cannot use the app, I guess my solution may be to carry my laptop out there for the alignment.

In either case, it would be extremely helpful to be able to superimpose a crosshair at image center over the live view. Is that possible?

Thank you,
John

Hello John,

Currently we are re-designing the app and the Polar Alignment module would also be updated to be a lot more accessible. The updated app will not support polar alignment in the first release since it requires careful redesign but we hope to release an updated soon afterwards. The polar alignment does not use streaming though , it just capture images at some interval specified by you.