Thursday, June 04, 2015

Teclast x98 Air

It's a Chinese Windows 8.1 tablet, featuring a OTG port.

I have tested last night, ASI 130mc could be used without problem.

However, Lu070m failed probably due to insufficient power from the OTG port.  A powered USB hub should work, but I got to test again.

This could be perfect for webcam imaging and guiding purpose.

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To give a little bit more background, it features dual boot so you could choose between Windows 8.1 and Android 4.4.4 during startup.  There is no hot swap between two systems unlike some other Chinese offerings.

The 64G storage was split around half-half, with the Windows side having slightly more memory.  After installation of Office 2013 (bundled for free), SharpCap, ASI and Lumenera drivers, Stellarium, ASCOM Platform, PhD Guiding, BibleWorks, VLC player, Dropbox (occupying around 6G of space), I got around 9.5G space left.

I will need a buy a fast 64G micro SD for image capturing.

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Installation Notes of ASCOM platform:

It required .NET 3.5 but Windows 8.1 has .NET 4 instead.

When I try to install .NET 3.5, the system refuses to install and after applying all the Windows Update, it success... but then it eats up a few gigabytes too.

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Finally, I bought a 32G SD with 48M/s speed.  I will try to use it solely for imaging purpose, and upon capturing, I can take the card out, and process the files from my PC.  32G ought to be enough for one or two imaging sessions.

And then I also bought a OEM bluetooth keyboard and mouse, to be used with the tablet.  It's nicely designed so that it makes the tablet notebook like!  Best of both world, a small portable notebook, a tablet which can run all my astronomy applications, guiding, image capturing, processing, plus the android side for daily work.  The added bonus is the capacity to run Bible Works!


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To further simplify the whole thing, I've bought a OTG cable which allows direct connection to the camera: