Jacqui Greenland replied to the topic 'Ioptron ipolar' in the forum. 4 years ago

I ran across this thread and wanted to offer some info that may or may not be useful.

We have an ipolar on my wifes setup and I wanted to move everything onto an RPi so we didn't have to trail long usb cables from the gear to the laptop (she likes to sit in the warm) and as a result I've been playing with ekos and the ipolar.

The ipolar seems to work happily with the V4L driver and doing some USB sniffing on the protocol the official software uses it does seem like a pretty bog standard device in that respect. What I did have to do is change some settings in the indi control panel as it seems to default to a 640x1280 image and not the 1280x960 it is under capture options which led to some interesting visual effects. I also needed to tweak the gain up quite a bit to get decent images (around 288-320 gave me good results) and with that set and a 250ms exposure I have been able to capture images which I can solve at nova.astrometry.net so it does seem to have the capability.

However, actually trying to run the polar alignment routine (using the local engine with all the indexes downloaded) leads to the astrometry process just sitting at 100% CPU and never finishing, or at least not finishing within any timescale I've so far left it running (in the order of 5-10 minutes) and I was under the impression it should be a lot faster than that.

Hopefully that information helps in that the ipolar seems to work well enough to capture images to solve with the V4L driver, I'm just now stumped on what my problem with solving them locally is so am going to need to learn a bunch more about the commands to try and run it against the images I captured from last night as my cloudy SW UK skies are not likely to give me another clear period to test in for a while.

Jacqui

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