Rasberry Pi USB-Serial FTDI device issues.

Submitted by Ford295 on #1

<p>I have an astrophotography setup in my garden that I currently run a powered USB cable from a powered USB hub on my scope mount that all the peripherals connect to.<br />
Most have their own power supplies but a couple are powered through the USB cable. I also have two devices that use USB-Serial FTDI adapters, one is the mount and the other is a cloud sensor. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 in the scope house that acts as a USB hub using the Virtualhere usb server.<br />
I am using the trial version and using one USB connection at a time for testing purposes. I am able to see and use my CCD camera and my autofocus unit both of these are normal USB with their own power supply. Another two devices are not seen, my electronic USB filter wheel and my guiding camera (powered through USB). When these are plugged into the Pi nothing changes and no ports appear just the Pi itself. The last two devices are both the USB-Serial FTDI devices, the mount and the cloud sensor. I can't see the mount at all but the cloud sensor shows up as a Com port in device manager and in the actual software but it will not connect to the Com port at all.<br />
Does the Com port need any configuring beyond that default settings or am I missing something else.<br />
I should add that client software is run on a Windows 10 laptop. If nothing else works I would love to get the cloud sensor working through this setup if possible.<br />
Any help or advice greatly appreciated.</p>

Submitted by Michael on Sat, 2019/12/14 - 11:03

#2

Plug the usb filter and and camera, and when they fail to appear under the Raspberry Hub in the VirtualHere client, send me the output of dmesg (or post here) e.g

sudo dmesg > out.txt

Submitted by Ford295 on Sun, 2019/12/15 - 01:11

#3

Hi Michael,
I seem to have sorted out the main one for me which was the Cloud sensor that was showing a virtual com port but that would not connect to the software.
I changed the port settings in device manager under the Advanced tab. I changed the endpoint to High Performance Bulk and the software connected. So that's one down. I will try and get the info you asked for shortly. I am very new to both the Raspberry Pi and the Virtualhere software so please bear with me.

Kevin

Submitted by JulieR on Sat, 2020/01/04 - 09:10

#4

Hi Kevin,
I have a very similar astrophotography setup to the one you describe. I also use an RPi4 as a USB server connected to a USB 3.0 powered hub on the scope mount. The mount is connected via a USB-serial FDTI cable, and all other peripherals (cameras, filter wheel, rotator, GPS and focusers) via USB 2 or 3 cables from the powered hub. I am also using Win 10 running on a laptop. My setup works very well. I have no problems with connection to the mount (EQ8 running via ASCOM Green Swamp Server and PRISM software). I would strongly suspect the USB-serialFTDI adapter, but also make sure to use a high quality USB hub.
Julie

Submitted by MiguelE on Sun, 2020/11/01 - 15:17

#5

Hello Julie.

I know this is an old thread but I read you got the server working on the PI and I wonder if you can help me with some pointers on how to get the cameras to work. I can see/connect to any device I connect to my powered USB3 hub including the cameras. But the images from the cameras do not download. PHD2 looping times out waiting for the image and APT takes the image but it does not download to anywhere and no errors. My cameras are ZWOs with latest drivers.

I hope you are still around this forum and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Miguel

Submitted by JulieR on Wed, 2020/11/11 - 12:17

#6

Hello Miguel,

I have only just seen your message, as I don't look at this support site very often.

If you are still having problems I am happy to help if I can. As this is not strictly a VirtualHere issue, it would probably be best if you send a message to my G-Mail account
rogersjulie101000 [at] gmail.com (rogersjulie101000[at]gmail[dot]com) Just remove the three trailing zeros from the number for the correct address.

The first thing to try, if you haven't already, is reducing the USB limit for each camera. Set it down to 40 and see if that enables images to be downloaded. If that works, then you can gradually increase the limit and determine the maximum value that you can use. I have previously had two ZWO cameras working when connected to TheSkyX and to Maxim DL 6, as well as Sharpcap. I have not tried connecting to APT and PHD2, but I can give this a go so we can compare results.

Let me know how it goes.

Kind regards,

Julie