USB relay controller

[Roland.penton]

I am wondering if anyone has tried this device with with BackYardNikon. I am having no luck at this time.

[astroman133]

I am confused as to why you think that this would work with a Nikon camera. It appears that it is intended to connect to a serial device, but the camera is a USB device, so you can just use a USB cable to connect the USB port on the camera with a USB port on the computer. If you need extra length, use an active USB extension cable.

[Roland.penton]

2 hours ago, astroman133 said:

I am confused as to why you think that this would work with a Nikon camera. It appears that it is intended to connect to a serial device, but the camera is a USB device, so you can just use a USB cable to connect the USB port on the camera with a USB port on the computer. If you need extra length, use an active USB extension cable.

Unfortunately you can not go more that 30 seconds on a exposer with just the usb connection. you have to use bulb an the serial connection to go longer. Since BackYardNikon supports the use of com port i was hoping this might work but have not been able to get the camera to trigger with it at this time. thought i would see if anyone had any luck with that model of relay.

[astroman133]

It depends on your camera model. Newer Nikon cameras do support BULB over USB so a second cable for shutter control is not necessary.

If you have an older model then you will need to run two cables between the camera and your PC. One is a USB to USB cable and the other is a compatible shutter control cable. I strongly doubt that relay cable from Amazon is compatible with BYN. You need a DSUSB cable from Shoestring Astronomy. This is what BYN is compatible with. You can confirm this on the Supported Cameras page for BackyardNIKON. Click on the link at the bottom of this page and read the text above the chart of camera models.

[admin]

Which Nikon camera model do you have? Most Nikon cameras since 2015'ish do support BULB over USB without the need of an extra cable.

Regards,

[Roland.penton]

13 hours ago, admin said:

Which Nikon camera model do you have? Most Nikon cameras since 2015'ish do support BULB over USB without the need of an extra cable.

Regards,

D200 firmware has been updated. 

[astroman133]

You should know that going forward Nikon will be supporting new cameras only from their 64-bit software library. This requires a 64-bit version of Windows and a 64-bit version of BYN. This version will not support the very old D200 camera, which requires 32-bit operation.

Before going down the rabbit hole of creating a solution that allows you to shoot BULB exposures via a separate shutter control cable you might be better served to buy a newer camera that supports BULB over USB.