Backyard astrophotographers .. is your control PC indoors or outside?

Hi Andy,

For me the main reason for moving to a mini-pc scope side is so that in winter I can keep all my doors closed. I image from my roof terrace and the cold in winter comes straight into the living room through the crack if I run a cable outside. I already had a power connection outside so that was not an issue.
I also like that it is a dedicated system for capturing only and in the mean time my desktop is available for processing or anything else really.

If i need to be outside tweaking the scope I can RDP in from the iPad and if in the middle of the night I want to check I can do the same from my nice warm bed.

Did try once with the long active USB cable but I went through a few as I either bought too cheap or managed to trip over it in the middle of the night and snag it.

CS Sean

Sean van Drogen:
I image from my roof terrace and the cold in winter comes straight into the living room through the crack if I run a cable outside

That's a nice idea as I could run power from my garage instead of running through an open window which my wife always complains about.

Hi Andy,
I build a wooden box that stands next to my tripod that includes al the control stuff. There is a sixfold socket with a switch, a 12V power supply, the telecope control, my MGEN-II and a mini PC. the cables are led though slits on the sides. Everythng is dry even in humid nights. The cables are bundled for camera 1, camera 2 and the mount.
That works very fine for me. I should post a photo.
CS Ulli

Andy Wray:
I moved my main PC that controls everything from outside to indoors via a very long active USB cable.

That works for me as I just run that cable and a power cable out to my gear in the back garden.

I see a lot of people use mini-PCs/ASIAiRs on their scope.

In the backyard scenario, what are the pros and cons?

This is exactly what I do. I have about 8m of high speed usb cable running from the rig into the house and into my laptop.

I like working from a laptop, rather than some remote computer as it gives me complete control. Never fancied the ASI Air as I prefer to use NINA.

I only need to leave the back door open a crack to let the USB and power cable out. I don't mind the slight draught as I'm a bit of a fresh air nut anyway

I image in my backyard away from my house and nearby trees. I control my equipment through a 10 meter USB cable and pc set up in my shop. The cable and power cord are run through a 2" PVC pipe cutout in the wall. Heater, fan, radio, LED lights, cushions and a 6 foot table to stretch out my notes and stuff. Also my cat for companionship. 

I have no mount-side PC. I use a USB-ethernet extender to control the scope via a 30 meter Cat7 ethernet cable direct into my PC in my office. I like the fact that all files are directly loaded onto my PC hard drive, and I have direct and complete control over the mount, camera, focuser etc.   The USB devices and mount plug into the Receiver box.  The Transmitter  box , 30 meters away, is connected to my PC via a single PC. 

I am using a cheap mini-pc from seeed studio,which is powerfull enough to run Nina.
The mini-pc is directly mounted to the telescope, the only cable that leaves the scope is the 12V power cable as I am connected to my home network via Wifi.
Everything is controlled via remote-desktop from my laptop.

When I am out to my dark site I use the Hotspot mode of my ipad to establish wifi, works like a charm.

I use a low power mini PC (Intel NUC with an i3 CPU) in an IKEA VESSLA (the cover has a hole in it, convenient for passing cables) underneath the mount. The box also contains the 12V power supply. The USB cable from the NUC and the 12V from the power supply go to the PegasusAstro powerbox on the OTA, which distributes data and power with minimal spaghetti. I use RDP to connect over the network from my desktop machine in the study (nice and warm). The last hop on the network is WiFi for now but soon I'll have an outdoors RJ45 port so I can transfer data at full gigabit ethernet speeds to my workstation PC. The NUC continues its job when I switch RDP client devices to my living room laptop or bedroom tablet. The rig keeps running unaware of how or even if I'm keeping an eye on it.

I also have 3 imaging trains (a RASA8, a C9.25, and a widefield Samyang 135 setup) and I leave them assembled and wired up. Each has a pegasus powerbox, so I use the same PC, the same software and power supply under the mount and switching OTAs is just a matter of putting it on the mount and hooking up 2 cables. 

The NUC runs all kinds of software, is compatible with any device that has an ASCOM driver (and even some that do not) and runs even heavier software like NINA acceptably well. For planetary I put in a large-ish and fast SSD which blows any raspberry-pi derived device out of the water when it comes to frames-per-second. It does kind of struggle to run deeper analysis things like real-time CCD inspector. But plate solving with ASTAP takes a blink of an eye. Live stacking with sharpcap pro is a breeze. This has been my setup since 2018 and I've had no problems with it.

So for me,I use two set ups and both have the computer inside. Set up 1 is in the observatory with the computer in the warm room. All the cabling is in a shield from my control box to the scope. This works for all my scopes as the only difference between scopes is the focus controller. Unforgenetly all the scopes use a different focus set up. A robo-focus for the FSQ106, the TEC 160FL uses a Starzona Micro-Touch focus system, and the DSI (pictured) has its own internal focus system and controller. I just plug in which ever cable needed for the set up being used.
In the control box is all the connections with a single USB cable going to the computer. For the field set up, and yes I still tear everything down and go out to our dark sky site every new moon, because 80% of the fun is the comradely of the group, you open the plastic box and pull out the cable to the scope and the usb to the computer which is in a trailer. Takes two minuets.

The telescope is placed in the garden a bit too far from the house to use a usb cable.
So I use an inexpensive laptop placed in a insulated plastic box next to the mount.
I connect wirelessly through a wifi extender inside the house placed on the closest window to the laptop.
I use my main laptop to connect via Teamviewer to the laptop outside and control everything sitting on the couch.
The temperature outside is often -8C, -10C (I live in Scandinavia) and to keep the computer warm I put on the box two extra blankets and a bag full of hot water inside the box that lasts whole night.
The laptop runs PHD2, NINA and controls mount and cameras. Pegasus pocket power box power everything except the laptop.
In the future I’ll probably switch to Asiair but for now I’m happy with this solution 🙂

I have my mount setup on terrace & use LAN RJ45 150 feet cable to control laptop connected to the mount on terrace, cable runs down to my desktop 2 floors below in my bedroom.

I use Windows inbuilt feature 'Remote Desktop' connection to control laptop on terrace. So full speed connection without any issues.