Hi all, I am getting tired of messing around with flats and darks manually on an otherwise automated system. I see that the Flip-Flat system is supported, so was hoping that those that use one with INDi/Ekos could chime in on your thoughts on it.

First and most importantly, how well does it work?

Would you do it again/recommend it?

How difficult is it to get set up?

Any problems with light bleed through it or on edges for doing darks with the backlight turned off?

Thanks for any feedback

Jim

It works pretty well without any issues. Mechanically you just have to mount it really careful to make sure it is dust-tight. The problem is that last time I checked, they stopped making it!

It seems to still be available, though not inexpensive:

www.optecinc.com/astronomy/catalog/alnitak/flipflat.htm

Great! Go for it! I had no issues doing completely automated flats with Ekos.

Okay. Done Should ship soon. Very much looking forward to it. Dust sucks.

Flip-Flat received. Installed, Plugged in. USB port dance complete. Online. It works!

Just a couple observations and questions.

It appears to do what it needs to do to take flats, which is very cool. If the light is not on, it is turned on automatically, for example. I am playing around now the auto-dark, full darks, and more flats without manually going to INDI to make any changes. It does seem to control the ADU by exposure length only. I have the panel set to 60 right now, and to meet my ADU, the exposure time is changed around, but the brightness seems to stay put at 60. Is there any provision for changing the brightness automatically? It probably isn't necessary, this is just a question for curiousity.

One thing that might be nice to change or fix is - it does not open the cover when you switch to Lights. I tried a sequence in of 5 flats at 15k ADU, 5 darks at 45s (it turned the light off), and 5 Lights. The Flats and Darks were fine, but the Lights did not open the cover. Is there ever a reason to take a Light frame and not open the cover?

Going the other way, cover open, put Lights in sequence and then flats, and the cover closes automatically when it gets to flats.

I ran into a problem periodically where it would get a NAN error and basically hang the captures in an endless loop. I turned on logging in the camera module, but that doesn't seem to have much in it. What other logs would I need to turn on for this? I attached the ASI log.

2017-09-15T23:45:37 Capturing image...
2017-09-15T23:45:37 Current ADU is nan Next exposure is nan seconds.
2017-09-15T23:45:09 Capturing image...

One other nice thing to add is in the Calibration screen, the settings for the type of flat device and the ADU are not saved.

Overall, it is working great for me right out of the box though. I have a new set of flats without having to touch anything, and they are the best flats I have had to date.

Nice work!

The capture module now indeed does not open the flip flat, so just make sure that your calibration frames are run last for now.

Not sure about NAN value, can you share a flat field frame you captured?

link to the last flat before things went sideways: drive.google.com/open?id=0B4I8UcuosfBHVlNfLU4zTGl6dGM

Fair enough. If it is easy to persist the settings for type of flat device and ADU setting, that would be a welcome change.

It is persistent if you save the sequence queue.

So it saves it across an imaging session, but when you restart, it is gone and has to be set up again. In my use case, I am on a tripod without a dome, so I take my setup offline a lot. My request was based on my camera not changing (it would use the same ADU to get a flat no matter what filter might be used), and since it uses the flip-flat, I will always check the radio button for "dust cover with built in flat light" across all setups and sessions that use this scope. I realize my usage is different than an observatory where things would remain running all the time though.

Ok, settings are saved now.