#raspberry pi 3B/4B

11 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

plain bolt
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I wanted to buy a raspberry + astroberry for my mount and camera control. I was wondering if anyone has experience in using this and has an recommendation on which model to get how much RAM you should use.

Thanks!

tired hemlock
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Not many ppl on here use Astroberry but If you’re going to do it, a 4B and 4GB of RAM. Technically Kstars/ekos runs with 2GB but it’s not happy. A Pi 5 will have significantly better performance.

plain bolt
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Alright thanks!

feral torrent
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I'm using rpi4 4GB ram + astroberry and it's running with no problem
but like teamonkey said rpi5 is an upgrade

elfin glade
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Can you use a pi to control the celestron nexstar 5

tired hemlock
plucky ether
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I know you explicitly asked about RP, but did you consider getting a mini PC and controlling your mount and camera with sth like NINA. Price-wise is probably the same/similar and mini PC gives you more possibilities.

wet drum
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@plain bolt unfortunately the astroberry OS doesn't seem to be getting updates and I've run into a number of problems. I've ran it on two different Raspberry pi 3Bs and a 4 but was having constant stability and performance issues.

Most of the problems had to do with processing images, so getting them from the camera, converting them to a fits format and then doing stuff with them like saving to a drive or platesolving. Especially when platesolving it would crash every 3 or 4 images and in general converting an image would take like 30 seconds for a pretty low res low bit depth image. And I was doing 30 seconds subs usually so I would lose half my night simply converting images and saving them.

So after trying fresh installs, different Pis and different SD cards I was pretty fed up with the OS and bought a cheap second hand Intel NUC mini computer, put windows on it and having been using Nina ever since. Not planning on going back any time soon. So do consider doing that! It doesn't have to be a NUC, there are lots of cheap mini computers on Amazon and aliexpress with N100 processors and around 8 gb of ram and that is plenty for a smooth experience on windows.

plain bolt
blazing magnet
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My personal experience (and I am no expert at opensource/linux based stuff, but I have been using it for decades) is, that astroberry is just too much effort and the performance is laggy at best (i tested in on rpi4). If you are used to nina, just get a mini pc. It usually needs a tiny bit more power, but the performance is simillar to a laptop.

plain bolt
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Alright thanks guys, il look further 🙂