Support for master and slave cameras

I have a research application where I need to put three OTA’s on one big AP mount and have three big cameras, each with their own dedicated PC. I would love it if there were a way to designate one of the PC’s running SGP to be able to slave the other two PC’s and cameras so all three would be taking their images at the same time. Only the master would control the mount and make targeting decisions.

Thanks for reading!

This will be available in the near future. Most of the code is complete… we just need to work on gracefully disabling all of the SGPro features that a slace instance should not have access to.

That sounds absolutely fantastic!

How would the master PC/SGP communicate camera actions and file names with the PC/SGP slaves? Via IP on the local observatory LAN?

Via the SGPro public API. The first release will only support multi camera on a single PC. Then after we test this a bit, we can think about how to use other machines.

I don’t think that having three FLI Proline cameras on the same computer and same USB buss would ever work.

I can’t see why not. The chances that 2 images are downloading at the same time is probably pretty slim. Even so a well designed camera should be dumping the image to an internal buffer so reading the image is not required to flush the CCD. Astro gear is really pretty gentle on the USB bus…a webcam has more traffic over USB

Thanks,
Jared