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How to set up Ekos for 2 scopes and 2 cameras on the same mount

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Hi!
I run Kstars and Ekos on both. Depending on what I want to do, I might chain focuser and camera from one and effectively just use one instance of Kstars/Ekos. If I want to use both cameras simultaneously, I use the two Kstars/Ekos instances, each on their own R-Pi, independently. I control it all from indoors over VNC (two sessions, one for each R-Pi).

I can not run it all on one R-Pi since I have no way of identifying which focuser and camera is which - they are identical to the Raspberry.

Magnus
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3 years 1 month ago #66738

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I am struggling with the same issue and way fewer programming skills than the rest of you.

What I have noticed however is that if I connect two identical Atik CCD cameras to one Raspi and start Ekos with Atik CCD in the profile, I see the two cameras as Atik and Atik_2. I can e.g. assign one as main camera and the other as a guider. What is more, the allocation of the cameras (Atik or Atk_2) is consistent between sessions as long as I do not change the USB port that I connect them to. What I have not tested yet, but what I expect, is that this behavior extends to more devices as long as they are consistently connected to the same USB port on the Raspi, e.g. through a USB hub. So FW and FW_2, EAF and EAF_2 etc.)

What I have also noticed is that all attributes of my two cameras are the same except for the USB port-related info (1-1.1, 1-1.2 etc.). It shows up in the KERNEL info.
So if I can create unique alias based on the USB port the device is connected to, and I can connect that unique alias to a custom driver, I might be able to define them as different resources that I can use to create profiles etc. For the time being, I am even struggling to do the first step in this experiment, but maybe someone with more skills want to try it out.
3 years 15 hours ago #69361

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I where able to make a renamed instance for my Sony number 2 "Piggy", in profile as AUX, and then I could change between my a7 and a5000 in the capture (and elsewhere camera selection is an option).
BUT when I did run as Jobs, the same camera was used throughout all jobs. Apparently the sequences stored did not contain camera used in the sequence.
I will look carefully into the use of two RPi, but what I really want is to shoot the two cameras in parallell. I know, all kinds or problems with dithering and waiting for both to finish... but I am thinking about a simplified solution. Just a shutter control of the piggy back camera, if needed just same exposure as the main, or if possible any shorter to avoid dither conflict.
The whole idea is to gather double amount of data in same time.
Last edit: 2 years 11 months ago by Gustav Olav Lundby. Reason: Just some details.
2 years 11 months ago #69843

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Tried this. Does not seem to work. The Profile does not seem to be stored with the job. At least when I double click on a job using "Sony" profile but without focuser, the tick off for focus run goes away but the profile does not change to "Sony" profile. And visa versa when job is using "CCD" profile.

Have anyone tried this for real? Does Scheduler change profile for jobs? Or is the Profile only read at first job for starting Ekos once? I guess so! The start of Ekos is when Profile is used, and will be continued until next startup, that would only be after a preemptive shutdown.

Would it not be more natural that Camera was stored in the sequence at the capture tab? There it is selected. Talking about that. Why is telescope an attribute for the Mount tab. Is not a telescope a lens and should be stored with a Camera object. Then a change of camera would associate with a lens/telescope and the FOV could be calculated for the other functions.

It is when working with a dual setup one realizes how the object oriented design should have been.
2 years 11 months ago #69955

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Hi!

I've tried it with the same results that you have. Profile is not linked to jobs. You can see that in the sequence file - profile comes first, before any job-tag. So it is set once for each sequence file, not for each job file. Apparently (I am not a programmer), this is not easy to change - it has to do with things embedded in the architecture. I've submitted a suggestion to change it in Github, but it demands someone who can work quite a lot with the code for the scheduler. 

If you "just" want two cameras to run in parallel, at the same time exposing the same target (like a side-by-side), you can accomplish this with 2 R-Pis, scheduled to start at the same time. One of them will just control a camera, thus loosing framed when telescope is slewing, aligning, dithering etc. 

Magnus
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2 years 11 months ago #69958

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Yes! Just arrived at same conclusion after more tests. Also tried to make capture sequences alternating between ZWO and Sony. It did almost work. It made captures with each their own camera, however I got a lot of retry from the Sony, probably due to the fact that the capture tries to learn the aprópiate download time as it works and try to reuse average across the sequences. Therefore after having experienced times around seconds with the USB3 ZWO camera, it failed to wait long enough for the Sony using almost 5seconds and threw out "failed to download" retrying.

So that is the end of my experiment. The Ekos is plainly not written for multi scope/camera installations.

I have in parallell worked on using my other RPi to just fire parallell job sequences on my Piggyback Camera. Turning off dithering and carefully plan start times and duration of sessions, it is a possible solution. I then use TeamViewer and switch between my two Kstars-Ekos-INDI installations. The Piggyback one gets a mount simulator defined to be happy, nothing more. It is using manual camera lenses so no focus motor, no plate solve, no guiding, leaving all this to main installation. It's just a capture machine riding on top.

(I think someone should make a Piggyback camera tab doing just this within the Ekos environment.) Yes! Just arrived at same conclusion after more tests. Also tried to make capture sequences alternating between ZWO and Sony. It did almost work. It made captures with each their own camera, however I got a lot of retry from the Sony, probably due to the fact that the capture tries to learn the aprópiate download time as it works and try to reuse average across the sequences. Therefore after having experienced times around seconds with the USB3 ZWO camera, it failed to wait long enough for the Sony using almost 5seconds and threw out "failed to download" retrying.

So that is the end of my experiment. The Ekos is plainly not written for multi scope/camera installations.

I have in parallell worked on using my other RPi to just fire parallell job sequences on my Piggyback Camera. Turning off dithering and carefully plan start times and duration of sessions, it is a possible solution. I then use TeamViewer and switch between my two Kstars-Ekos-INDI installations. The Piggyback one gets a mount simulator defined to be happy, nothing more. It is using manual camera lenses so no focus motor, no plate solve, no guiding, leaving all this to main installation. It's just a capture machine riding on top.

(I think someone should make a Piggyback camera tab doing just this within the Ekos environment.)
Last edit: 2 years 11 months ago by Gustav Olav Lundby. Reason: Just some details.
2 years 11 months ago #69962
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The EKOS Scheduler is not designed for multiple parallel scopes and cameras. But another user reported success with two strategies.
First Strategy. One INDI server with all his equipment that included the second camera and focuser and an instance of CCDciel to orchestrate a capture sequence and autofocus.
Second strategy: A virtual machine running KStars and EKOS. Selecting NO when asked if you wish to stop the current instance of INDI.
They reported the second strategy downloaded images more quickly.
2 years 11 months ago #69971

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Successfully using separate RPi on piggyback for asyncronous parallell carefully avoiding dithering. I think dithering is not needed when the aim is to combine the two sessions in integration?
2 years 7 months ago #74327

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