Looks good mate hopefully they can get it to run smoothly over time so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this as I'm fed up with ZWO's closed system
For the Raspberry Pi time, it doesn't have a built-in real time clock. You can install one to the I/O board, which is inexpensive and takes about five minutes to configure. I've tried Astroberry but could never get on with the polar alignment. I could give it another go but this looks like it's potentially more polished and straightforward - at least when it's officially available.
I had issues with Polar Alignment in Astroberry as well. It stopped working properly after an update. Unfortunately the project is no longer maintained so it's a bummer. If you haven't yet tried, Stellermate is good and kept up to date (although not free).
This is very interesting. I'll have to give this a try at some point. I have a spare Raspberry Pi somewhere around here... I've been using Astroberry for years on a Raspberry Pi. The RPi is such a neat tool and so customizable and one of the reasons I never even thought about buying an ASIAir. Unfortunately, Astroberry is no longer maintained so I'm back to NINA while I start up Stellarmate on that Raspberry Pi that I have somewhere around here...
Astroberry is stuck on an old update and there's zero signs from the developers last time I checked. Also, kstars is stuck before 3.6.0 update on astroberry, because all new updates work only on x64, and astroberry uses arm32
I just hope that projects like this will eventually make ZWO realise that hardware when we buy it is ours and implement what is even now available... They are also using open source hardware and software... I congratulate qhyccd for this move, now I love their products much more than before
Time sync is a pain in the field with devices like this, but is solvable. I have two solutions: You can buy a small real-time clock plug-in that you stick onto the Pi's GPIO header (this lets you maintain general time sync), and you can also hook a USB GPS up to the device and point the software at it (Astroberry at least supports this, not sure about QUARCS yet). The GPS option requires an extra external device, but it gives you even more accurate time and also automatically detects your coordinates if you tend to move around a lot.
Have you tried installing INDIGO with the INDIGO Sky image for the raspberry pi? It's essentially a lightweight Debian image (no desktop environment) with the INDIGO server preinstalled, although once you install it you need to connect the raspberry to the internet to upgrade packages with apt, which will upgrade INDIGO server to the latest version. I use it on a raspberry pi 4 with 2 GB RAM and it performs well, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with the raspberry pi 5. INDIGO comes with a control panel and an imaging client (Ain Imager) for Windows / Linux which you can use to connect to the Raspberry server
SSD-boot using an external SSD or hat is really the only way around it tbf, but honestly I've never really minded a few extra seconds- plus, I connect the Pi by Ethernet to my control PC, so latency is dramatically lower than over WiFi
May have to give this a try!! I’ve only ever used raspberry pi’s for my 3d printers and I tried kstars once. I have a couple laying around also!! That’s the only downfall of zwo they could have had a top tier product but instead it’s only just “great” because of the hardware limitations. Who knows maybe qhy will drop a harmonic geared mount next haha What a time to be alive if you’re an astrophotographer!!
I'll load this on my old ASIAIR Pro and see how it goes. I doubt it has any code to drive the power outputs, but I recall there was a script that could be loaded to set the PIOs and enable the power.
There is one huge problem: it is a company deliberately torpedoeing open source projects, namely phd2 and stellarium, and possibly INDI. For instance, QUARCS forked phd2 from January 28 2024. In February they pushed a large and undocumented set of breaking changes into their fork of phd2 - many of these changes are disputable. Since then, the real phd2 has had a large number of improvements, and not a single of these improvement has been ported into the QUARCS phd2 fork. I doubt it will ever happen because the disputable changes mentioned above make it extremely difficult to synchronize the two versions. In short, QUARCS might be stuck with the version of phd2 from January 28 2024, forever. Honestly, I haven't even checked if it's the same story with stellarium and with the INDI drivers because I find this kind of behavior infuriating. Please, do the open source community a favor, put a little bit more effort into the raspberry pi and use KStars, or get a mini pc with NINA, or anything that is a proper open source project.
As long as they follow the rules and spirit of the open source model, this is a non-issue. If the source is available and good, then it can be integrated.
@@jamieamendolagine205 they don't seem to be doing anything illegal. The source is available. I wouldn't say it's good but that's just my opinion. So, sure, it "can" be integrated. If it "will" be integrated is anyone guess. That's 8 months so far, so they don't seem to be in a big rush for the integration though. Also, if they were planning to integrate, I imagine they would have done several things differently (perhaps considering not forking to start with, or at least making sure that changes can easily be tracked and isolated).
i think they did it for bug reproducibility. if you have a moving target, how can you reproduce. again, no beta yet. that doesnt mean drop the subject, it means, give them time.
Really curious to see how this software pans out. If they include things like ASIAir’s plan mode, and if it’ll work well with a Pegasus Astro powerbox, I’d probably switch from the ASIAir. I’d also love to know how it handles WiFi extenders/travel routers/wifi in general. Thanks for keeping us in the loop on this!
Looks great and I agree with that it seems smooth, all they need is to get the dirvers and this will finally be a direct competitor to the ASIAIR. All the other portable stuff were not true direct competitors in the way this is. What amazes me as it took about five years for some company to do this. With all of the high tech intellegent poeple in the astro world, I would have though it would have been a lot sooner. Cheers
Hi Dylan. I would think that Quarcs is a fork of Kstars-Ekos-Indi as is Asiair and as such it should have a 3 point polar alignment routine, so no worries there. The issues with Raspberry pi 4 are the poor USB throughput, wifi and power management. I suspect Asiair solved these issues by adding additional hardware. A Raspberry pi 5 is far superior for i/o and power, though the wifi isn't a great deal better. Not a big issue unless you are a long way away. I use an ASUS Tinboard2 running Armbian on my kstars setup for these reasons, though other newer and better boards are now available, The pi5 is the best option if Quarcs is only available for Rpi. Looks interesting..
Looks awesome! So is it going to be open source? Where do I find it? I'd love to see it available for other platforms -- the raspberry pi 4 is a bit "long in the tooth". I've switched to intel Mele's for my telescope control using linux / kstars etc, and would love to give this a try.
I just managed to make my Franken-Setup work with N.I.N.A. - (NEQ6 - with EQMod over Serial Cable, Sony A7rII as main camera, Lacerta MGEN II as Guider). As tempting as this may seem, I think it will take a long time before my niche Gear will be supported by QUARCS. I hope they follow through. Competition is a good thing for ZWO and us in the end.
I think this might be better served on a minipc like astropc (intel, plenty of ram, NVMe/SSD) - I started with Astroberry (great project) and if I had to estimate, about 1/3 of my struggles were with the rpi (overloaded trying to guide, capture, plate solve, focus, write FITS simultaneously) and power - specifically having a decent powered USB hub. The number of mornings I would wake up and the program had crashed resulting in not even a 1/4 night of observation drove me crazy . I recently moved to astropc/NINA and I must say the stability of properly sized hardware and the NINA software is much better...I just hate the fact that it runs only on windoze...sigh
I had similar issues with astroberry in the past on pi3. Got a lot better on Pi4 and with the stellarmate os i can‘t remember a crash on an imaging session. Since they run stellarium I am just curious if they will use ascom or indi drivers.
Hello Dylan ... love your channel ... and love this project. I have been a member of the Discord since your first video on this, but am still searching for the Raspberry Pi Image. I found the Quarcs_Pi4B_240914.img.gz file several days ago on a shared Google Drive, but I was never able to get it to write & verify on my micro-SD card (I may have a corrupted version of the file). Is there a new complete image that I can install without having to compile all the code?
I’ve only done it once for DSO .. worked great with Nina three point polar alignment (there’s a video somewhere) but normally I use it for the sun. Video on that coming soon.
This project would help me so much! I’d like to try to integrate a PS4/X-box controller to it if I can. I wanted to do that little project as part of a DIY Raspberry Pi 4/5 myself for some time now, because the buttons on the hand controller of my Celestron NexStar 127SLT have been worn out over the time, and even if I clean them with alcohol, they won’t last for long before needing the cleaning again. If I do, I’ll make it an Indy device and post it online. (I haven’t looked yet if anyone has already came up with something similar).
@@DylanODonnell I like the idea of an analog controller automatically selecting the slewing speeds as you push the sticks more and more, allowing you to slew faster or slower naturally, without having to constantly entering the menus, especially for optical observations, or even for tracking the ISS for example.
@skesinis I believe INDI has drivers for generic game pad USB controllers, which you can connect and use to control the mount movements, it should also allow to configure the controller by mapping buttons to specific movements / functions
You really need a 5v 5A supply. You might get it to fire up with less than a 5A supply but under-powering these things is a fast road to a world of pain...
I too am looking for an ASIAir "alternative" to run all the gear that ASI doesn't support . I know it is all just Marketing B.S. but ZWO has an opportunity here to rake in all the fringe Astro Users by simply releasing their ASIAir with new Software , no hardware updates required , and cleverly call it the ASIAir Universal ! This would wipe out the competition overnight . Wouldn't it ?
I didn't really expect too much after your last video, but honestly, this looks great. The possibility to access this via browser, and not just some app, makes it great already. Using Stellarium as base planetarium is also nice imo. I use it all the time and it's super easy to use. For just a preview, this looks good already. I hope they'll continue developing it
I know right? Browser access works, android and iOS support already, but also SSH if you want command line access and probably other ideas as it matures .. it’s a great fundamental platform :)
At the end of the night, it makes no difference if your images were taken with the ASIair, NINA, SGP, QUARCS, BYEOS or any other program . What matters is what workflow best suits your circumstances and preferences. While more choices are better for everyone, but not every choice is right for everyone.
Its just nothing is meaningless, everything has a meaning and a purpose, but you just need to figure it out, and all signs will lead you eventually to Allah (God), the Great Creator of all things, but we need not blind ourselves from the truth and lift away the seal that we put on our hearts to accept it. Your channel and content is very special, keep it up.
nice, finally....I knew there was some serious sympathy for QHY, now I like 'em even more...
Looks good mate hopefully they can get it to run smoothly over time so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this as I'm fed up with ZWO's closed system
For the Raspberry Pi time, it doesn't have a built-in real time clock. You can install one to the I/O board, which is inexpensive and takes about five minutes to configure.
I've tried Astroberry but could never get on with the polar alignment. I could give it another go but this looks like it's potentially more polished and straightforward - at least when it's officially available.
Yeh I’m looking forward to seeing how they handle polar alignment !
I had issues with Polar Alignment in Astroberry as well. It stopped working properly after an update. Unfortunately the project is no longer maintained so it's a bummer.
If you haven't yet tried, Stellermate is good and kept up to date (although not free).
This is very interesting. I'll have to give this a try at some point. I have a spare Raspberry Pi somewhere around here...
I've been using Astroberry for years on a Raspberry Pi. The RPi is such a neat tool and so customizable and one of the reasons I never even thought about buying an ASIAir. Unfortunately, Astroberry is no longer maintained so I'm back to NINA while I start up Stellarmate on that Raspberry Pi that I have somewhere around here...
Astroberry or Stellarmate are also good solutions for raspberry pi and you can polar alignwith the software.
Astroberry is stuck on an old update and there's zero signs from the developers last time I checked. Also, kstars is stuck before 3.6.0 update on astroberry, because all new updates work only on x64, and astroberry uses arm32
Will it ever beat my favourite control software, KStars?
I'll give it a try though, should be fun
I am looking forward to this. I use a mini pc for my C11 equipment, but this will be so useful for my 82ED travel kit!
I just hope that projects like this will eventually make ZWO realise that hardware when we buy it is ours and implement what is even now available... They are also using open source hardware and software...
I congratulate qhyccd for this move, now I love their products much more than before
Time sync is a pain in the field with devices like this, but is solvable. I have two solutions: You can buy a small real-time clock plug-in that you stick onto the Pi's GPIO header (this lets you maintain general time sync), and you can also hook a USB GPS up to the device and point the software at it (Astroberry at least supports this, not sure about QUARCS yet). The GPS option requires an extra external device, but it gives you even more accurate time and also automatically detects your coordinates if you tend to move around a lot.
Looks pretty nice, I was about to sell my pi4, and this info, makes me hold it. Might be able to contribute
looks great, im still looking for a lightweight image for raspberry 5.. im using astroberry.. all is working well, but its to heavy, even for rasp 5.
Have you tried out Astroarch? It's updated for 64bit ArchLinux
Did you manage to install astoberry on RPI5? The image should be hard be hardware incompatible. How did you do it?
@@darrylreif1492 to be honest i dont even know it anymore haha, i did not used it a long time. i will look how. buts very slow.
Have you tried installing INDIGO with the INDIGO Sky image for the raspberry pi? It's essentially a lightweight Debian image (no desktop environment) with the INDIGO server preinstalled, although once you install it you need to connect the raspberry to the internet to upgrade packages with apt, which will upgrade INDIGO server to the latest version. I use it on a raspberry pi 4 with 2 GB RAM and it performs well, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with the raspberry pi 5. INDIGO comes with a control panel and an imaging client (Ain Imager) for Windows / Linux which you can use to connect to the Raspberry server
SSD-boot using an external SSD or hat is really the only way around it tbf, but honestly I've never really minded a few extra seconds- plus, I connect the Pi by Ethernet to my control PC, so latency is dramatically lower than over WiFi
I hope this comes to fruition. It's not good when there is one that tries to Rule Them All.
May have to give this a try!! I’ve only ever used raspberry pi’s for my 3d printers and I tried kstars once. I have a couple laying around also!!
That’s the only downfall of zwo they could have had a top tier product but instead it’s only just “great” because of the hardware limitations.
Who knows maybe qhy will drop a harmonic geared mount next haha
What a time to be alive if you’re an astrophotographer!!
I'll load this on my old ASIAIR Pro and see how it goes. I doubt it has any code to drive the power outputs, but I recall there was a script that could be loaded to set the PIOs and enable the power.
There is one huge problem: it is a company deliberately torpedoeing open source projects, namely phd2 and stellarium, and possibly INDI.
For instance, QUARCS forked phd2 from January 28 2024. In February they pushed a large and undocumented set of breaking changes into their fork of phd2 - many of these changes are disputable. Since then, the real phd2 has had a large number of improvements, and not a single of these improvement has been ported into the QUARCS phd2 fork. I doubt it will ever happen because the disputable changes mentioned above make it extremely difficult to synchronize the two versions. In short, QUARCS might be stuck with the version of phd2 from January 28 2024, forever. Honestly, I haven't even checked if it's the same story with stellarium and with the INDI drivers because I find this kind of behavior infuriating.
Please, do the open source community a favor, put a little bit more effort into the raspberry pi and use KStars, or get a mini pc with NINA, or anything that is a proper open source project.
As long as they follow the rules and spirit of the open source model, this is a non-issue. If the source is available and good, then it can be integrated.
@@jamieamendolagine205 they don't seem to be doing anything illegal. The source is available. I wouldn't say it's good but that's just my opinion. So, sure, it "can" be integrated. If it "will" be integrated is anyone guess. That's 8 months so far, so they don't seem to be in a big rush for the integration though. Also, if they were planning to integrate, I imagine they would have done several things differently (perhaps considering not forking to start with, or at least making sure that changes can easily be tracked and isolated).
i think they did it for bug reproducibility. if you have a moving target, how can you reproduce. again, no beta yet. that doesnt mean drop the subject, it means, give them time.
Really curious to see how this software pans out. If they include things like ASIAir’s plan mode, and if it’ll work well with a Pegasus Astro powerbox, I’d probably switch from the ASIAir. I’d also love to know how it handles WiFi extenders/travel routers/wifi in general. Thanks for keeping us in the loop on this!
Looks great and I agree with that it seems smooth, all they need is to get the dirvers and this will finally be a direct competitor to the ASIAIR. All the other portable stuff were not true direct competitors in the way this is. What amazes me as it took about five years for some company to do this. With all of the high tech intellegent poeple in the astro world, I would have though it would have been a lot sooner. Cheers
Nice, thank you.
I'd suggest a heatsink for that Pi 4.
Good idea 👍🏼
Hi Dylan. I would think that Quarcs is a fork of Kstars-Ekos-Indi as is Asiair and as such it should have a 3 point polar alignment routine, so no worries there.
The issues with Raspberry pi 4 are the poor USB throughput, wifi and power management. I suspect Asiair solved these issues by adding additional hardware. A Raspberry pi 5 is far superior for i/o and power, though the wifi isn't a great deal better. Not a big issue unless you are a long way away. I use an ASUS Tinboard2 running Armbian on my kstars setup for these reasons,
though other newer and better boards are now available, The pi5 is the best option if Quarcs is only available for Rpi. Looks interesting..
Thanks for the heads up! Hopefully in time as the source will be open it can be compiled for all manner of devices :)
Looks awesome! So is it going to be open source? Where do I find it? I'd love to see it available for other platforms -- the raspberry pi 4 is a bit "long in the tooth". I've switched to intel Mele's for my telescope control using linux / kstars etc, and would love to give this a try.
Only via discord right now, but apparently it will work on Pi5 too :)
For PA.... I find Sharpcaps PA tool a godsend. If they can integrate that style of PA then it's a winner to me.
Is tere any way that we can access to the latest build of Quarcs?
I'm going to check it out. I have experience with the INDI + Ekos and would like to see if this could give me a reliabler, simpler experience.
Yeh it’s certainly “lite” and “light” physically .. would be great if the open source nature gets traction and it becomes more useful over time.
sooo... shortcrust or puff pastry??
Guergans here helping on Quarcs
Great :)
I just managed to make my Franken-Setup work with N.I.N.A. - (NEQ6 - with EQMod over Serial Cable, Sony A7rII as main camera, Lacerta MGEN II as Guider). As tempting as this may seem, I think it will take a long time before my niche Gear will be supported by QUARCS. I hope they follow through. Competition is a good thing for ZWO and us in the end.
Yeh Nina / Mini PC will always be a much more robust and featureful setup but this will be good for more simple, automated astro.
@@DylanODonnell Statfront Remote observatory is soo tempting but my kids still need to get some education ^^
Excellent video.
FIRST Hanging out to see how this turns out Cheers mate
Sorry for the lack of dick jokes this week :)
@@DylanODonnell You still mentioned it though so you made up for it cheers mate LOL
I think this might be better served on a minipc like astropc (intel, plenty of ram, NVMe/SSD) - I started with Astroberry (great project) and if I had to estimate, about 1/3 of my struggles were with the rpi (overloaded trying to guide, capture, plate solve, focus, write FITS simultaneously) and power - specifically having a decent powered USB hub. The number of mornings I would wake up and the program had crashed resulting in not even a 1/4 night of observation drove me crazy . I recently moved to astropc/NINA and I must say the stability of properly sized hardware and the NINA software is much better...I just hate the fact that it runs only on windoze...sigh
I had similar issues with astroberry in the past on pi3. Got a lot better on Pi4 and with the stellarmate os i can‘t remember a crash on an imaging session.
Since they run stellarium I am just curious if they will use ascom or indi drivers.
I'm interested. Thanks heaps! I'd install as dual boot on my mini pc so I can still use NINA if I want.
Have you seen Astroberry? Similar to this, also open source.
I mentioned in the last vid yeh! Same fundamental principle really :)
Looks promising!
Hello Dylan ... love your channel ... and love this project. I have been a member of the Discord since your first video on this, but am still searching for the Raspberry Pi Image. I found the Quarcs_Pi4B_240914.img.gz file several days ago on a shared Google Drive, but I was never able to get it to write & verify on my micro-SD card (I may have a corrupted version of the file). Is there a new complete image that I can install without having to compile all the code?
What’s your username in the discord ?
@@DylanODonnell richard_23569
RPI 4 doesn't have an rtc. thats probably why you times are out
Thanks for the tip !
Almost losing the sd card is pretty funny. I've lost some in devices a few times. Some devices aren't super easy to dismantle to get it back.
Haha story of my life
Sweet
What sort of guiding do you get with your sw gti upside down? Better than mine probably :(
I’ve only done it once for DSO .. worked great with Nina three point polar alignment (there’s a video somewhere) but normally I use it for the sun. Video on that coming soon.
Count me in ! Sick of asiair closeness environment
What i really need is a portable mount for 20kg payload and with a cost under $1k :))
This project would help me so much! I’d like to try to integrate a PS4/X-box controller to it if I can. I wanted to do that little project as part of a DIY Raspberry Pi 4/5 myself for some time now, because the buttons on the hand controller of my Celestron NexStar 127SLT have been worn out over the time, and even if I clean them with alcohol, they won’t last for long before needing the cleaning again. If I do, I’ll make it an Indy device and post it online. (I haven’t looked yet if anyone has already came up with something similar).
Interesting use case!
@@DylanODonnell I like the idea of an analog controller automatically selecting the slewing speeds as you push the sticks more and more, allowing you to slew faster or slower naturally, without having to constantly entering the menus, especially for optical observations, or even for tracking the ISS for example.
@skesinis I believe INDI has drivers for generic game pad USB controllers, which you can connect and use to control the mount movements, it should also allow to configure the controller by mapping buttons to specific movements / functions
How much power does pi5 use?
No idea sry!
You really need a 5v 5A supply. You might get it to fire up with less than a 5A supply but under-powering these things is a fast road to a world of pain...
@@steamskynoise wow i expected them to sip power. Might as well use a tiny windows pc at 12v 2a :(
I too am looking for an ASIAir "alternative" to run all the gear that ASI doesn't support . I know it is all just Marketing B.S. but ZWO has an opportunity here to rake in all the fringe Astro Users by simply releasing their ASIAir with new Software , no hardware updates required , and cleverly call it the ASIAir Universal ! This would wipe out the competition overnight . Wouldn't it ?
Yup ! They should probably make that business was decision sooner rather than later !
Such a device already exists. It is called ASIAIR Pro. Just replace the SD card and install any software you want (including this one).
I didn't really expect too much after your last video, but honestly, this looks great. The possibility to access this via browser, and not just some app, makes it great already. Using Stellarium as base planetarium is also nice imo. I use it all the time and it's super easy to use. For just a preview, this looks good already. I hope they'll continue developing it
I know right? Browser access works, android and iOS support already, but also SSH if you want command line access and probably other ideas as it matures .. it’s a great fundamental platform :)
The Raspberry pie is great. You can program them with snakes and you can simply swap the SD card and turn it into a little mini retro game console!
Fun! My kids will love that (but tbh it would be for me)
At the end of the night, it makes no difference if your images were taken with the ASIair, NINA, SGP, QUARCS, BYEOS or any other program . What matters is what workflow best suits your circumstances and preferences. While more choices are better for everyone, but not every choice is right for everyone.
Exactly :)
Its just nothing is meaningless, everything has a meaning and a purpose, but you just need to figure it out, and all signs will lead you eventually to Allah (God), the Great Creator of all things, but we need not blind ourselves from the truth and lift away the seal that we put on our hearts to accept it. Your channel and content is very special, keep it up.
Thanks :)
No persistence is a deal breaker for me. I don’t want to have to set all this stuff up every time I turn on the device.
No that's just for the preview version .. it's not even beta yet. It will come :)
Looks awful
😂 chasing zwo ASIAIR the little device astro photographers love to hate but are always trying to copy
Like I said, zwo asi is a genius device :)