Compact PC suggestions

If you ever want to consider non-Windows, I use a Raspberry Pi 4 and StellarMate OS. It does everything I need and it's small & cheap. Unlike the AsiAir, there are no restrictions and it is truly open source.

If you have a healthy budget and don't have a current power solution, then the PLL Eagle is excellent.

If you already have something like a Pegasus PB and don't want to spend too much then as suggested a Mele Quieter 3/4 is excellent for the money.

I have a MeLe quieter 3 and enjoy it - but if I'm 100% honest, its wifi sucks badly, and even at home with it out in the yard, I suffer wifi dropouts regularly… And even for running NINA, PHD2, and a planetarium app, it is painfully slow. (8gb of RAM is a severe limitation for a windows based machine) 

I think the Mele or something similar would work fine if you installed Linux on it, but with windows, I'm strongly considering a PLL Eagle 5 (i5, 16gb RAM)  though, for me this will still ONLY be for scope control and image acquisition, I don't use that computer for anything else. I have a very high end workstation for processing photos, and at home, the acquired data on the MeLe is synced directly to my processing rig… So at the end of the night I can just pack up the rig and then fire up WBPP. 

I really like my MeLe quieter 3 and Wanderer Astro power box, but the eagle is a definite future addition to my rig.

hi

for  healthy budget  i Hight recommend  Primalucelab eagles 

cs, Brian

yes , however with eagles you have gps, switches, humidity control ( ecco 2) , SQM  sensor , power outlet and control and more 
also inclinometer, powerful wireless ,heavy case with multi accessories , of course more expense that is the rule 


cs, Brian

Thanks guys, lots of ideas here to look into. The PC will just be tasked with scope operations and nothing else so I think all of the suggestions would work.

Bastiaan Feenstra:
Nothing beats a MeLe Quieter (3 or 4) when it comes to weight and power consumption. Just get it with 16GB of RAM and put an NVME drive in it. Runs of 5V directly from something like a Pegasus Powerbox. With such a set-up, there's only one cable to connect to power your entire rig.

Yep - this is how both my setups look... 1x 12v cable from the ground to the mount - 12v from the dovetail saddle to the powerbox, 1x power and 1x data from the Quieter 3C to the powerbox, then cameras, focuser, guider, and dew heater all plug in to the powerbox...

Makes for a very very tidy rig.

Dmitrijus Tiazlovas:
Something I've found that may be worth adding. I use a MeLe Q3 mini PC with a decent M.2 drive. It's fine for most types of imaging but I ran into issues with high FPS recording. Sharpcap was not able to write data fast enough so the frame rate dropped significantly. I do not do lunar / solar often so not too motivated to fix this myself at the moment.

I didn't try sharp cap, but Firecapture on the MeleQ4c had no problem recording 160fps using an ASI715mc the other day.

Hello Tony,
I can only speak from my own experience: I do use a stick PC as astrophotography controller for few years already and I am very happy with it. It is part of my setup and I haven't used anything else since then.

Before I was like you, with the PC attached to the mount via (USB) cable, standing outside in my garden close to the telescope. But I wanted something more flexible and portable and which gives the freedom to control everything form a distance, from my terras or from inside the house if it gets too cold (I actually built my entire setup with portability in mind).

I looked into several solutions which existed in the astrophotography market at that time, but they all looked too limiting to me.
I wanted a solution to fulfill the following criteria:
- be powered by portable power packs via USB (5V)
- run under Windows, so that I have the flexibility to install whatever software I want
- to be small enough to fit into my pocket

So, at the end I opted for a MeLE stick PC (https://www.amazon.fr/J4125-Ordinateur-Ethernet-PCG02-GLE/dp/B08T5ZWYKS?ref_=ast_sto_dp), that attach on the tripod and not on top of the OTA (these small devices dissipate quite an important amount of heat as they have fanless CPUs and I did not want to create air flows inside the tube). Then I connected to it via Wi-Fi from my laptop in RDP (Remote Desktop Connection)

I have to say that I had some issues in the beginning, that I wrongly attributed to the stick PC:
- I used to randomly loose the RDP connection and I had to reconnect. I initially blamed the week Wi-Fi of the stick PC (which proved to be wrong, I'll explain in a moment)
- The RDP session on my laptop used to freeze from time to time. Again, I wrongly blamed the stick PC, as I thought it was not powerful enough to hold the load.

So far I did not pay too much attention to these issues as reconnecting used to solve these problems.
Until few days ago, when my RDP connection froze completely, so that I wasted an entire night trying to figure out what was wrong. I finally decided to look more in depth into the issue next day: actually the stick PC was just fine, the problem was the Wi-Fi connection from my mount (an iOptron HEM27): in my initial configuration, both the stick PC and my laptop were connected to the Wi-Fi of the mount, which proved to be too week to keep up with the data traffic. So at the end I changed my configuration and now I am starting a Hotspot on the stick PC and I connect my laptop directly to the stick PC via this hotspot and not as before through the mount. And now it works flawlessly.
I can say for sure that the stick PC is powerful enough to run all my astrophotography software: PHD2, APT, iOptron Commander via ASCOM, iPolar alignment software and I can also browse the light frames in ASIFit Viewer during the session without any problem.
And the Wi-Fi is also fine: maximum signal at my usual distance of 5-10m away from the rig.

Here below few images with my setup if you find them useful.

If you have further questions, I would be more than happy to answer you the best I can.

Yes, of course, you can go without the hotspot if you stay arround your home wi-fi. Alternatively you can connect to you mount's Wi-Fi in case it has Wi-Fi and it supports the load (mine it didn't).
In my case I wanted an authonomous solution for travelling in remote places where wi-fi is not available, that's why I needed a hotspot.

I use a Intel Nuc.  I had (for other purposes) tried some of the knockoff mini PC's (Miniforms, I think Beelink was one), and had issues with drivers and bios/uefi.  One for example I needed for an embedded system had such a minimal bios I could not set it to start on powerup, you had to push a button – and this was going to be inside a player piano.  Another, advertised as Linux compatible, had an audio system that only worked on windows. 

The Intel Nuc's had full, complete bios and good driver support.

Sadly Intel dropped out of the NUC business and sold it to ASUS.  I don't know if they are going to have the quality of Intel, but that's probably where I would try first. 

I have many friends who use Mele.  To me they just seem a bit too wimpy, but that may be that those fiends bought the cheapest version.

I am not a fan of the idea of putting them on the OTA if they have fans.  I already had to deal with an ASI camera with a fan that vibrated.  My PC goes on the tripod, and I have a (fanless) pegasus pocket powerbox advanced on the OTA for distribution of power, USB and dew control. 

I also include a small travel router on the tripod, with hardware ethernet to the NUC and mount, and the travel router either joins my home wifi if I'm home, or forms its own wifi access point if I'm remote (well, actually it always forms it, I just don't need it if at home). 

Note some mini PC's require 19 or 24V.  While buck converters are easy to come by, 12v is far more common for astro gear and if you restrict your PC to 12v you will find it easier to power especially for remote use. 

When shooting for a PC for the mount it's important to know how heavy your workload will be:  Live stacking for example, can be very heavy depending on frame rate, running Stellarium or planetarium software remotely can be moderately heavy.  Capturing video or high frame rates (for planetary for example) can put a decent workload.  I've had high workloads that actually interferred with PHD2 guiding and my NUC is not that wimpy.   Don't buy a cheap PC and expect it to perform like a desktop.  OTOH if all you do is DSO at 4 second intervals and process elsewhere, it doesn't take much to run that.