Pegasus SmartEye

[Weatherman362]

Hi Robin,
Nice to see you yesterday at the PAS. When trying to connect the SmartEye to your laptop using the USB C - we did manage to get the SmartEye fired up okay, but no connection was noticed in the available cameras. Could we have gone via Wifi instead? Trevor

[archer1960]

I have a SmartEye, and the USB connection on the SE is only for power and updating the firmware. You can only operate it over WiFi.

[admin]

Hi Trevor,

yes, lovely to see you at the show. I did wonder after the show whether there was some way to turn on the PC connection in the device settings, but given the answer from @archer1960 above, it sounds like that's not the case.

I've just looked at the product page and it does list 'ASCOM Alpaca Support', so that is the way to go. Make sure that your PC and the SmartEye are on the same WIFI network, then run SharpCap after the SmartEye has completed its startup (if you run SharpCap first then you would need to do File->Rescan for Remote Hardware once the SmartEye is fully booted up). You should then see the SmartEye listed as an Alpaca camera device in the Cameras menu, so you will get control over it in a similar way to using an ASCOM driver. The downside is that there is always a risk of dropouts on a network connection, so it will possibly be less reliable than a wired camera.

cheers,

Robin

[Weatherman362]

Thanks for the response Robin.
I sort of assumed that you knew that the SmartEye was Wifi only, but thought you knew a way of getting it connected via USB. I'll give it a test when it next clears!

Trevor

[archer1960]

If you can figure out how to make it work over a wired connection, I'm sure there are a LOT of people who would love to know, including me. I am not a fan of WiFi connections for astro stuff, and avoid it whenever possible. But I think it would require hacking the firmware in order to do that...

[admin]

I was just interested to try it out to see how it identified itself on the USB connection. Thinking about it, I expect that the USB port goes to the controlling computer system in the device (probably some sort of ARM based single board thing), and maybe the camera is internally linked to that computer via USB. Interestingly when Trevor and I tested, the smart eye didn't show up as a USB device at all on the PC (nothing showing in good old USBTreeView) - it was just taking charge via USB.

I must say that I do agree that wireless connections (bluetooth, wifi) are always prone to dropouts and should ideally be avoided for anything where continuous operation is required. OK for a Seestar as it will continue on its own if the Wifi drops out and then you reconnect and see what it has done. Bad for cameras, mounts, etc where you expect them to be available and working all the time.

cheers,

Robin