Can SGP use PHD2 running on a remote computer?

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1

I’ve been idly thinking of options for remote mount control and wondered if SGP could use PHD running on a separate system? The PHD uses JSON RPC and this seems to be designed to run remotely but I’m not sure if SGP could. The PHD setup asks for the install directory, could this be specified as a network address on a separate system?

If it could I can imagine a system where there is a remote controller that runs PHD locally to the mount with a network connection (possibly WiFi) to the main PC that’s running SGP. PHD. That should reduce the load on the main PC and the communication with the mount.

Chris

2

Hope I understand what you are getting at here. I remotely control my observatory using ethernet connection and icron usb extender. This system has worked flawlessly for over two years. My cat 6 cable is 150ft long for the icron. I have a second cat 5 cable for the 10u mount. Both cables run to a router for the lan connection. The house computer then “sees” all going on with the observatory computer and allows me to control all functions. SGP and PHd work well in this win 7 system.

The little I’ve read on wifi, the more I’m convinced that this is the most reliable system. With my configuration, getting wifi to work would entail a lot of money for repeaters.

3

I don’t think that’s what I’m thinking of, your USB extender is still sending everything down to the remote PC and PHD is running on this PC, the same one as SGP is running on. I am thinking of running PHD on a different PC - or for that matter a Linux box.

Agree about WiFi, it’s difficult to beat the reliability of a piece of wire.

Chris

4

I’m wondering what the purpose of this would be? Is it just to reduce the load on the main PC and comms with mount? My main PC is just loafing doing those things and everything else necessary to run SGP.

5

@Ken, @Jared, do you have any feedback? You are probably the only ones who can give an accurate answer.

TIA, Chris

6

SGPro expects to find PHD2 locally. That said, with some clever networking kung-fu it should be possible to create a scenario equivalent to:

ssh -f -N -p 22 -c 3des -L 4400::4400

Not really sure how to do this in Windows, but it is almost certainly possible.

7

a very long time long ago i used to run some stuff in a virtual machine on windows, but run PhD under the host OS (osx). i had cygwin installed on the windows instance and so was able to install openssh. a command similar to the above ssh port forwarding command did work to allow windows programs to connect to the PhD2 control socket.

8

Thanks Ken,

I’ll have a bit of a play and see what can be done. I suppose that ssh command is specifying that messages using IP port 4400 are to be redirected remotely somewhere.

Was wondering if some addressing scheme like the one used for the plate solver would work. It allows SGP to connect to Astrometry.net running on a remote system.

My rather grand plan was to run PHD2 on a Raspberry Pi mounted on the mount, but there’s a lot needed to get this going. Connecting to SGP is a long way off.

Wonder if specifying a remote address such as “\REMOTE_PC\Program Files (x86)\PHDGuiding2” would do the trick for a second PC. Must try it.

9

This may be what you’re looking for:

http://muzso.hu/2013/01/08/port-forwarding-on-windows-with-builtin-tools-netsh

Have fun making imaging more complicated :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Jared

10

It does… the html formatter ate part of my original response… should read:

ssh -f -N -p 22 -c 3des [user@domain] [server ip] -L 4400:[PHD2 server IP]:4400

Yes, this is essentially ssh tunneling with port routing.

It is possible, but comes with a fair amount of complications normal users don’t want to deal with (mostly punching holes through firewalls… and restricting IPs that are allowed to call on it… PHD2 and ANSVR are not designed for security)