Revolution Imager R2

[Star Dad]

This is a preliminary report... before actually using it in the field with a crowd. Call it a set up and test functionality.

The imager arrived from Orange County Telescopes in very short order - like three days. The documentation is very sparse. I read a number of reviews where people just gave up on using it, I'm an engineer and I don't let lack of documentation stop me. First off - it is a nightmare in cabling. There are a lot of cables and they have to be wired specifically. I would highly recommend putting labels on the wires so you can reconnect them quickly and don't have to redo the puzzle. This is especially true if you get the wifi transceiver which add even more wires to the melee. Just unscrambling them can take some time.

The handheld controller for the camera is a little quirky - you can only scroll UP through the menus. You quickly find out that this is essentially a low light level security camera with a 1.25" adapter. The buttons on the camera appear to do nothing. Everything is controlled by the white handheld wired controller. The battery unit must be charged - but there is no way to determine if it is charged. And to charge it, it must be turned on. I have not yet used the unit on battery only mode... but to use it on AC power you do not have to have the battery on - but the red LED is still lit, so it can be easy to think you are charging when in fact you are not. Not a good design. But then this thing is more of a kludge of diverse parts put together.

So, once you have all the cabling connected the monitor comes on. My first time out with it took a while to decide whether it was working. Last night I dedicated an hour to getting it to work. At first I was seeing nothing but hot pixels and I cranked up both the gain, exposure time, and number of exposures to no avail. It suddenly dawned on me that I was seeing hot pixels and maybe the camera was not in focus. It does not focus at the same point as my ZWO ASI294MC, but closer to an actual lens' location. Any way, as I was fiddling with the focus I finally saw the familiar donut shape barely appear out of the background and I had to adjust the focuser. I was having a devil of a time and for some reason I decided that maybe I should back off the gain, stacked images (aka DNR setting), and exposure time. I set it to 12,2,and 64 respectively. and after a minute or two out popped a whole bunch of stars - unseeable with the human eye.

You have to download and install the WIFIAV-HD app for iOS or Android devices. This is another quirky piece of not well thought out software. But I turned it on and connected to the wifi transceiver and there the stars were. Not very bright but definitely there. One word of cuation about this app - well maybe two. First off my iPhone cannot save images to a card reader... apparently this is an ongoing issue with iPhones that comes and goes with each update. The app can save the images on the phone, but I have not discovered where the images are stored nor how to delete them. Amazingly the authors apparently thought you'd want to keep the images forever. Apparently humans were not taken into account when designing the app. I was a human factors engineer for software, and this is just a really bad interface. But it works.

As I stated above, this whole system in a kludge of disparate pieces that are band-aided together. I hope they can (will) put it together in a more compact form, but it does work and with COVID-19 it is an excellent solution for outreach. I will update this when I do an event - I have one slated for this Wednesday and Thursday nights, but the weather gods are trying to spoil it.

[Star Dad]

As I was packing for the event tonight I decided to pre-hookup the lens to the camera. SURPRISE! The lens is just slightly bigger than 1.25" and will not fit in any adapater I have. YIKES! I will have to make an adapter, but there is no time. So I hope that that 5x barlow I bought years ago and have never used will work. That will make my scope a 5,000mm FL - or about 250X, which I rarely can use on the planets. And with high humidity - oh well guess I'll see. The lens, I have subsequently read, is used to operate the camera independent of a telescope providing a 10x zoom. Report on tonight's escapades will follow....

[Star Dad]

Last night was a really tough night. Right out of the box - literally, my AC power supply cord had apparently been ripped apart after using it last time (I have no idea when that was). Naturally I did not bring my big deep cycle battery seeing as AC was available. OK, use the built in 8 AA battery holder. Only problem is that in extracting it to be able to put the batteries in it, I pull too hard and the power cable to the interior circuit board pull out of its pins. There is no way to get it back in without a pair of really long needle nose pliers. OK, so now what. Nearest WallyWorld is 10 miles away. Brilliant thought.... cut the DC cable and the AC cable and use the DC plug on the AC cable. It worked... but not after about an hour of cursing and driving me nuts. So that's how the evening began. Oh and let me add that the scope would not go to where it was told. For some reason the hand controller would not beielve it was summer of 2020 and kept resetting to DEC 27, 2000. I finally figured out that it was the Daylight Savings Time (Yes or No) that was causing the problem. Setting it to yes and verifying the date seemed to fix the problem - and there went another 30 minutes....

I was greatly surprised at the magnification with the IR R2. I would guess on my scope I'm seeing about 60-100X. The sun was huge. I couldn't find any spots so I shifted to the Coronado PST and after getting it in focus you could clearly see flares taking place. Again the image was very large. Didn't look all that great on the wifi connected phone. Not bad but the image is quite small on the phone.

The myriad of setting on the IR R2 are bewildering and it took me a while to finally settle on settings for Jupiter. I did use their cheat sheet on their website to help guide me. There was a lot of moisture and haze and high level clouds so I'm not going to ding the unit for bad conditions. Jupiter was about the size I'd expect for my 110X 9mm lens. The bands were indistinguishable and at one point Jupiter developed a halo ring. The 4 Galileon moons were clearly visible. Lots of oohs and ahs. Shifted to Saturn which appeared much smaller but you could still clearly see the rings. Tried using my 5x barlow but I couldn't find Saturn so I gave up on it's use. I then tried M31 and M13 and the Owl cluster (NGC457). No color. There is a setting to keep daylight colors but I couldn't find it on the fly. It was in AUTO mode. I have noticed that some of the menus seem to change based on something else being selected. Having no documentation is a real bear!

And now for the really bad news. The wifi apparently only allows four connections. We only had 50 people attending (MA state mandate) and people were constantly complaining that the password was incorrect (it's 12345678 - not a hard one to screw up). I powered down the unit and restarted. I got on and shortly after others started complaining and that's when we realized it was a number of connections issue. That really sucks to put it mildly. I'm so glad I didn't have 400 people in attendance.

My solution to this problem is to have the laptop connect to the wifi and connect a projector to the laptop and project the image on a screen. I'm currently downloading the bluestacks4 software that will allow me to install the WIFIAV-HD software (its 542 megabytes). Of course this will only work if I can have AC power. I guess I will be testing my pure sine wave inverter and deep cycle battery for the next outreach where AC is not available.

As I mentioned in my other posts, this system is really a kludge of disparate components, and last night the lack of documentation became painfully aware. I need more time with this system to become more proficient. So I hope that this review will help you to decide whether it;s worth it to you to purchase this. I ended up with a lot of people coming to look at the monitor. I still feel that there is nothing like looking through the lens for that AH HA! moment when you finally realize that we are on a tiny blue speck in a vast universe. But in the era of COVID-19 this is about as good as it gets.

[Star Dad]

Update from yesterday. The idea of using the laptop was a total failure. I had to download an application that emulated the android OS. Then install the WIFIAV-HD app. No worky. I tried two different emulators - they are really for playing games and they could not be used to connect to the RI R2. In desperation we went out and bought a lightening connector that allowed the signal to be sent via HDMI to our projector which worked well. The bad part is the display was really pathetic on a movie screen. Saturn was just a blob, where on the LCD screen is was very sharp - and although small you could clearly see the Cassini Division.

I just found out that the monitor stretches the images... there is a setting to change it to 4:3. I was wondering why Jupiter looked like an oval - as well as the Sun in Coronado PST solar scope.

I definitely need time to figure out and record setting for various objects as Jupiter was not really very good at all - over exposed even though I increased shutter speed. Not at all like the picture they show you on their web site. I suspect it is a stacked image with fast shutter speeds.

I slewed over to the Owl Cluster and tried to put the .5 focal reducer but I misunderstood where the lens was supposed to go - and since I could not separate the 1.25 adapter I put it on the end. But simply in the time that took the dew had completely encased the lens. So that was a bust. I dearly wish they would provide documentation. I've pretty much determined some settings, but more time with this system will help. Again, only 4 wifi connections can be made. So I'm not going to promote the wifi - but only give out the password to a select 2 or 3 people so we don't have problems, leaving one for people to serially connect to take photos if they wish.

Finally, I don't think I mentioned it before - but the power supply for the whole thing has a cord that is maybe 4 feet long - way too short. I'm going to have to splice in a substantial amount of wiring because the Ioptron Mini-Tower has a tendency to take the shortest path to the next target and thus can end up wrapping power lines around itself until they break - it happened to me once so I usually try and manually slew to unravel it, but sometimes I forget to do that.

So this is my final report until or unless something changes. I have to say that is it an ongoing adventure. Keep looking up!

[Star Dad]

Yesterday I had some time to work in my woodshop and made an adapter for the RI's 6-60mm zoom lens. I am pleased to say that it works! I used a lathe to mill a 2" outside diameter and then a drill press to gouge out 1 one inch interior. Then I switched the bit for a sanding drum and sanded out the remaining 1/3" diameter or so. Nice, tight fit.

Last night I tried using the lens and I was able to achieve focus. So this will give me 16x-166x which will be fantastic for making it easy to locate and then zoom in on targets. I will grant you, however, it's not the greatest lens - but good enough for the monitor.

[gcisko]

Yesterday I had some time to work in my woodshop and made an adapter for the RI's 6-60mm zoom lens. I am pleased to say that it works! I used a lathe to mill a 2" outside diameter and then a drill press to gouge out 1 one inch interior. Then I switched the bit for a sanding drum and sanded out the remaining 1/3" diameter or so. Nice, tight fit.

Last night I tried using the lens and I was able to achieve focus. So this will give me 16x-166x which will be fantastic for making it easy to locate and then zoom in on targets. I will grant you, however, it's not the greatest lens - but good enough for the monitor.

You made an adapter to use the 6-60mm zoom lens in a telescope eyepiece holder? Did I read that right? Can you post an image of that equipment in use?

It is quite an adventure you have had. Thanks.

[pakarinen]

Being opposed to dragging a laptop out for imaging, I’ve done some research on the R2 and I was thinking it didn’t look optimized for Astro - more like a homebrew kludge. Your review confirmed that for me. I’ll wait for a cleaner design (if I even go down the imaging hole) or reconsider a ZWO. Thanks!

[Star Dad]

You made an adapter to use the 6-60mm zoom lens in a telescope eyepiece holder? Did I read that right? Can you post an image of that equipment in use?

It is quite an adventure you have had. Thanks.

Yes, I did. I will endeavor to post a picture of it. The lens is just a tad bigger than 1.25" - more like about 1.30" or so. Not really sure - I should put some calipers on it to verify. It was mostly a process of using a 1" spade bit in the drill press to hollow out the adapter and then using sanding drums to widen it out until the lens fit snugly into the adapter.

@pakarinen: No, the RIR2 is definitely not a good AP system - it is very low res, but it's good for outreach during this COVID crisis.

[Star Dad]

I took the RIR2 out last night to view Mars. Big disappointment. Out of focus I could definitely see the red hue of Mars. But in focus it was wiped out, displaying only a solid white and the image was tiny. I know Mars is still far away, but the eye/brain connection is so much better than the camera. I tried using the zoom lens but I could not get much of an image with it either. I need to drill a hole for a set screw to ensure the camera is locked in place. No biggie, but really disappointing.