From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: June 19, 2010 11:38:12 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Chameleon USB 2 - First Light with Astro IIDC

Hi Tim;

On 19-Jun-10, at 8:10 AM, doobisary wrote:

Sounds interesting!  Particularly if one wants to run two cameras on a Mac with only one firewire port.

You could use a FireWire Hub or a Repeater in that situation.

Or if your camera has more than one FireWire port, you can use that too.

That is what I do when I do DSO Imaging. I have one FW800 cable running form the Mac to the Grasshopper, and then an 18" FW800 to FW400 cable connecting the second port on the Grasshopper to the TIS FW400 Guiding camera. So the cameras are Daisy Chained.

Now if I PGR had long (to 60 minute) exposure times directly (like TIS does), instead of the need for GPIO pin connections, I could re-use the 4 GPIO for to replace the GPUSB or a Serial Port for mount control, which would mean everything is done on a single FireWire cable instead of 2 or 3 cables.

How does the exview HAD ccd compare to the ICX618 that everyone on cloudynights seems so excited about in the Flea3?  

They are both EXView HAD CCD's and both are 1/3" physical size. The difference is the ICX618 has bigger (and fewer) pixels. They likely both run very hot too. The Chameleon is in a plastic case, so it traps the heat and the camera internal temp after 20 minutes was +25 to +30°C warmer than ambient.

Every EXView HAD CCD camera (analog, usb, FireWire) I've owned runs very warm to hot. As a Prime Focus camera, they would require some form of active cooling or they'd rile up the image way too much in front of the optics.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

-Tim.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "milton_aupperle" <milton@...> wrote:

Hi Folks;

Here is First Light (Image) with the PGR Chameleon USB 2 camera.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Other/ChamleonUSB2_DesktopView.jpg

Thats a screen shot of Astro IIDC controlling the PGR EXView HAD camera, running at 1280x960 pixels for color images. I just got the control code spliced into Astro IIDC code base yesterday and got the bulk pipe code running this afternoon.

I still have a tonne of work for test things out and have several known issues to fix, but if we are lucky Astro IIDC 4.06.00 Alpha 8 will support fours USB 2 /3 Cameras by the end of next week.

Have a great weekend..

Milton Aupperle