Sorry for not being clear. I wrote “chained” hoping that it would be clear that I plug in both the guide cam and the EFW into the USB hub on the ASI1600 or ASI6200.

No special USB configuration for the imaging camera. I use all defaults apart from specifying the gain and offset. Nothing else.

This is on Ubuntu Server 20.04 with the Mate desktop by the way.

And FWIW I always, ALWAYS, connect via an ethernet cable, even when in the field. I make sure that the RPi has a fixed ip address in the range of my home WIFI network so no matter what it always has the same ip address and I can connect to it however I like, whether it is plugged in to my router at home or directly into my MacBook when I am in the field.


Wouter

I just checked my setup with mate. It's 2.4 and it's doing perfectly fine with everything plugged in. USB3 is working fine as well. This is a setup I've been using for months without any wifi or USB issues. So it does not look like I need 5G. I'm going to try and switch off the hdmi on the astroberry setup...

One HW thing is just a little different --- I'm using two RPI4's here. The first (mate) one is the 4G memory version, and the astroberry is an 8G version. I'm going to switch the hardware between them and see if that makes a difference.

OK, so I've got some success. It looks like it is the hdmi. I set hdmi_ignore_hotplug=1 in /boot/config.txt and now it boots and I can ssh to it over wifi using 2.4G. All while my camera is plugged in to USB3. This is great, I think that I've got a fix. I just need to install a VNC separate from X11/HDMI and I should be good to go. I can still VNC. but now just get a blank screen "can not currently show desktop". I verified that HDMI is not working by plugging it into a TV. No HDMI output.

I have HDMI turned off in /boot/config.txt by some option, maybe search power saving techniques to check exact directive, it does not stop VNC working just turns off HDMI hardware.

hdmi_ignore_hotplug=1 turns it off. Unfortunately since the astroberry VNC setup is sharing the X11/HDMI desktop, VNC stops working after you do this and just gives a black screen with the message: "can not currently show desktop". On my other setup I ran a VNC separate from the X11 desktop and was able to shut off HDMI output. That's why that setup worked with WIFI and USB3.

OH, and I was mistaken about the distro that I used for my previous setup. It was actually raspbian, not mate.

Jamie

You need to specify the screen resolution in the same file where you disable HDMI. See this post for recommended settings:

indilib.org/forum/general/6922-kstars-on...untu-mate-20-04.html

So I was going to switch from realvnc to tightvnc so that it is not tied to HDMI, and I found that is inside of the package astroberry-server-full I'm not sure how to disable realvnc, or to configure it to not be tied to hdmi. Any ideas?

I connected an Alfa AWUS051NH long range wifi USB adapter and got it running a lot better. I set the 'device' in the advanced network config to the new wan1: that shows up for both my wireless connection, and the astroberry server hotspot. Full disclosure: I'm still getting this setup, so I don't have that many hours running like this. But I ran all day learning hot to park, track, and goto with my new HEQ5, and used it last night without connection issues.

With USB3 devices my PI4 would sort of sometimes work, and sometimes I couldn't connect wifi, but could connect to the hotspot. With a ZWO ASI 224, ZWO 120 on USB3 and my focuser and Sharpcap on USB2, all on a USB3 powered hub, it quit connecting to either type of network sometimes. But if I pulled the USB hub, it worked fine. I think there are a multitude of contributors to radiated electrical noise getting fed into the wifi antenna, so I expect it would work for some folks. Anyway, that Alfa USB is a really good radio, and fixed it for me.

Success!

I'm trying to avoid using a dongle if possible. I was able to get it to work for the first time today. Nothing all that special really, I just had to run the right commands to get the vncserver to start, and the right commands for the client as well. I'm going to make this better, but for now I just run on the astroberry:

1. ssh to the astroberry
2. vncserver 192.168.247.108:3

and on the desktop:

xtigervncviewer -via astroberry@192.168.247.108 :3

It connects and seems to work. From here I'm going to improve the process and make it start from boot. This is all without any HDMI output so I can turn that off and end the interference with wifi 2.4G / USB3 -- I couldn't get 5G to work, so maybe it's not supported on the RPI4? BTW: I didn't have to uninstall or disable the realvnc server, just ran tightvnc on it's own, and my router is setup to always issue that ip address to the astroberry --

Jamie

OK, so this is all that I had to do to get this to work (other than installing tightvnc)

sudo -u astroberry vncserver -localhost no :1

I can use my regular vnc software on my desktop to connect, but now to :1

USB3 camera is working great!

Another thing that I'm considering is just doing this from my linux desktop:
ssh -l astroberry -X 192.168.247.108

Then I can run kstars / phd2 etc and they will use X11 remoting. I should be able to use my giant monitor fully this way without being restricted to 1920.

Either way I've now got a very good system working and I think that I may switch to astroberry from my own home-brew linux system !