Telescope with Raspberry Pi

Notes and Info on using a Raspberry Pi with my telescope

Not going to say much about my scope other than it is using a Vixen GP mount which had an ra drive fitted when I bought it, and I am fitting a dec motor to it. Both motors are vixen MT1 and I have a hand controller DD-1.

I'm first of all planning to add an ST4 interface to the controller, which looks pretty simple, and then use a PiFace to drive the interface. I'll then use Linguider to give me an autoguide capability. I'll look at adding goto later.

(Well, adding an ST4 interface to the DD1 didn't go too well.... )

I'm using Raspberry Pi, 'cos I have a couple already doing other things and I like them, plus it's nice low power so I can run on batteries, and lots of people are using them as telescope controllers. The GPIO on the pi means I can drive various things direct, rather than through various adapters, although I will use a PiFace to protect the pi and give me a bit more drive (the built in output pins are only 3.3v and very limited current).

I'm using linguider 'cos I've read in many places that it works far better on pi than the other obvious alternative - openphd, plus I relatively easily added support for driving piface outputs to it.

This setup all works, although I need to tweak the settings of lin_guider and / or the scope alignment to get a nice tight tracking. lin_guider reports a swing on tracking of around 6 - 8 arc seconds on 1 axis (the other axis is < 1 arc second). This is a 2 minute exposure with a 560mm lens on a crop frame camera. If you open up this piccy (which is a big crop from the original) you will see all the smaller stars are slight stripes.

This setup looks like it will work well for tracking, but as I can't change the speed of the motors except by moving the switch on the DD-1, goto is not going to be seamless.

Starting on the pi.

I stuck the standard raspbian build (2016-02-26 Jessie) on card and booted up the pi. After the usual apt-get update / upgrade cycle (quite slow on a pi compared to my desktop...)  I setup for piface using this guide. I did basic checks with blink and presslights examples. (Note that I got a modprobe error when enabling SPI in 'raspi-config', but after reboot the spi devices were showing in /dev.

This thread describes a simple python guider, but it struggles to run on an original pi B, so I decided to mod lin_guider to support piface.

I also run the pi headless and access from a Windows PC (as various astro software is hefted on Windows). This is easy to setup:

sudo apt-get install xrdp 

Then in preparation for linguider I did (from the info in the readme)

sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
apt-get install fxload
apt-get install libftdi-dev

Note that g++, make etc are already there as part of build-essential after this lot.

Now do a first build of lin_guider (see gory details at the end if you need to), and check it builds and runs (without actually doing much at this stage).

Guiding scope and camera (zwo asi1034MC):

After faffing about with an ordinary webcam for a while, and finding that the finder I already had was going to be really hard to use (focal plane was inside the tube), I decided to get a new slightly larger guider finder and dedicated camera.

I bought a zwo finder guider and basic camera - one of these and one of these from the nice folks at 365astronomy.

I installed the zwo linux sdk on my raspberry pi (only need it to get the zwo library so that lin guider can talk to the camera, and hooked it up to lin guider.  Here's some details:

1. I got the zwo linux sdk from here. I had to download it on another pc as this web page crashed the pi's browser.
2. switch to the lib folder of the asi sdk and then use
   sudo install asi.rules /lib/udev/rules.d
   - this sets up permissions whenever the camera is plugged in so it can be used without special privilege.
3. after extracting the files I tweaked ld to find the file.
   cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d
   sudo nano libASICamera2.conf
   - and put in it the single line: -
   /home/pi/asisdk/lib/armv6
   - then ran ldconfig to update -
   sudo ldconfig

Now run lin_guider and set the config to use ZWO ASI as the device, restart it and it should pickup and use the camera.

There are dire warnings about the arm driver being unstable, but I have found by increasing the exposure time to 2 seconds it behaves well.

Hacking  the DD-1

I added a short lead with an RJ12 plug on the end to the DD-1. It would have been nicer to fit a socket, but there was no place a socket would fit, so I went for a short lead that I can use with an RJ12 coupler.

Also I went for minimalist at this end (so I will isolate at the other end), so the various movements are activated just by connecting pin 2 to one of the other pins. I took a standard RJ12 cable and chopped off one end at about 6".


Here is the inside of the controller all wired up:

• pin 2 ground
• pin 3 West: RA+, green
• pin 4 North: DEC+, red
• pin 5 South: DEC-, black
• pin 6 East: Ra-, blue

This should now work as a standard autoguider port, althoug as I used mine with a home brew, I haven't tested it with a 'normal' driving device.

Updating lin_guider to support piface

Decided to plunge into lin_guider and get it working with piface.

This was a bit tedious as it means downloading and building a couple of libraries and then writing a small driver extension for lin_guider. The libraries needed are here. (the other library needed is referenced from this one).

It would definitely be easier just to use some solid state relays that can be driven directly from the gpio ports, but as I already had the piface and other bits needed I went the piface route.

Making it all work well

Well I can run lin_guider and it does track, but I am getting a slight sawtooth effect on one axis which is large enough to streak stars slightly on longer exposures, so I need to tweak the PID settings or the setip of the mount, not quite sure which....

By strange co-incidence the another project is driving lego mindstorm motors so I have a basic understanding of PID setup and tweaking, but this will l have to wait for some clear, calm nights....

Best guide I have found for lin_guider is here.

A lot of gory details in case any of the links above disappear.

1. raspi-config to enable spi for the piface (rude message, but was working after reboot
   
2. sudo apt-get install python3-pifacedigital-emulator
   
3. test with python3 /usr/share/doc/python3-pifacedigitalio/examples/blink.py
   
4. download lin_guider from SourceForge - this didn't work on my pi web browser, so had to download to another PC and copy it over:
   
5. lin_guider readme explains how to build lin_guider, which I do after a couple of edits to allow it to drive through PiFace. This lot needs installing first though:
   
6. sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools
   sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
   sudo apt-get install fxload
   sudo apt-get install libftdi-dev
7. and this to enable provision of C access to PiFace:
   sudo apt-get install automake libtool
8.  switch to folder for unpacked lin_guider (not the 'lin_guider_pack' folder - the one inside that.
9. ./configure
10. make
11. I didn't need the udev bit as I'm not using a USB connection.
12. check that the standard lin_guider is working - go to the lin_guider folder and launch lin_guider (you will need to be running in a gui for this to work)
13. Now setup the zwo driver for the camera - the details are in the Guide scope and camera section above.
14. Now run lin_guider again and set it to use this camera, slow the exposure time down to avoid the interface library throwing a wobbly.
15. Now to do the piface bits:
16. grab libmcp23s17 make a new folder and......
    wget https://github.com/piface/libmcp23s17/archive/master.zip
    unzip master.zip
    make
    sudo make install
    now make a folder for the actual pifacedigital library and.....
    wget https://github.com/piface/libpifacedigital/archive/master.zip
    unzip master.zip
    make
    sudo make install
17. I wrote a small c++ module to integrate into lin_guider so I could drive out through a piface, but I haven't included the details here.