Hi,
Well, I've switched over to using vino on the RPi2-Mate board in combination with TightVNC on the Windows laptop. Seems to work quite well.
I did order a Pi3 now, to get rid of some of the network/USB bog-up. At least the WLAN doesn't use the USB on the Pi3.
Cheers,
Arjan
With great interest I have been reading your manual on the dual RPi - design looks great and I am tempted to replicate. Thank you so much for efforts and sharing! Now, also after checking all infos on indilib, I am not clear whether or not I need to run the indi drivers and Ekos on seperate physical Rasberry's, as suggested, or can run both on one single RPi (as per Ekos Tutorial for Rasberry it does not seem required)? I am planning to access Ekos (and ccd, Fits viewer) via VNC from my Android tablet. So far, the software seems to run, including Vino VNC server, accessing via Real VNC. Is it by any chance, the performance that is better when splitting drivers and Ekos-client?
Many thanks in advance, hope my question is not too trivial.
Helge,
Since I purchased an RPi3 I run KStars and IndiLib on this module, no performance issues. The RPi3 has much improved networking and built-in WiFi, and this eases the design a lot. I did use a Andoid phone with (I believe) RealVNC, but you can try out different clients. I do like to have larger area and many pixels, so a tablet would be a better choice.
One note: I have not tried the autoguider yet, this may prove performance heavy and hence still require the second RPi.
Good luck, keep us posted with your experiences!
Cheers,
Arjan
This was my experience at first as well and was discussed in one of my first threads. I also settled on X11VNC. I have also had a good experience with NoMachine and it's Android app.
An update of the document describing my setup can be found
here
.
Currently I have installed Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2 together with the latest INDI (1.5)/KSTARS package on a 64GB SDHC card, and all seems to run very well. VNC uses vino as server and a TightVNC client on the laptop. A big improvement has been to take out the two network legs of my home WLAN, and configure the Pi as an access point. Any VNC client can now directly connect to the Pi through WiFi, and the virtual desktop operates a lot smoother.
X11VNC or RealVNC both work fine. The Pi3 can handle the entire platform fine, as long as one does not overload it with commands in rapid succession, which can cause Indi to crash. What helps is putting a Swap file on an external HD, Keep swappiness at 60.
If you want a serious performance upgrade, get a Zotac pi332 pico, which has 4 GB of RAM and install Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on it. It is about the same size as a Pi3, but much faster due to increased RAM.