whole again my name is Nico Carver my website is at nebulaphotos.com if
you're liking these videos you can support me on patreon the link is in the
description or just subscribe if you've gone down the rabbit hole like me and
you've bought a computerized mount and cooled cameras and auto guiding and
filter wheels and automated focusing you'll quickly find that you just have a
huge amount of cables to deal with and so this topic we call cable management
dealing with all the cables and it's actually a big deal in deep sky
astrophotography if you don't know how to manage all of your different cables
it can actually be a problem for you a lot of beginners might have trailed
stars or things that are that are sort of strange and they don't know what's
going on and sometimes it's as simple as a cable got caught on something and then
the mount can't track properly so managing your cables is important for
that reason it's also important to save you time and this is something that I
really didn't get I thought I was being really organized because I had you know
a place where I put each cable then when I got there out on the field I knew
where that cable was I would take it out set it up it didn't take that long so I
was like why how is this how am I wasting time I was just really unaware
about how much time over the course of a year or years that was actually taking
is actually just just the process of
that's so just the process of wrapping a cable like I have I try to put these
velcro things on each one but even that you're just gonna end up at some point
with somewhat of a cable mess my full setup I counted all the different cables
it uses over 15 cables the most common type of cable is a USB cable of course a
lot of the different devices have to talk to each other or talk to the
computer the next most common kind of cable is a power cable and a lot of
these have a 2.1 millimeter power jack on one end and then some kind of custom
on the other end or before I did cable management what I would have a lot is
the 2.1 millimeter on one end going to an AC to DC power block and then the AC
plug on the other end so these these power blocs cables take up a lot of room
in your box they are more weight they're more fragile I think because at the end
here this can get sort of like bent out of shape and break over time you have to
worry about where they're sitting so that they don't get too much do on them
a lot of different worries with this what changed for me with cable
management is when my do heater controller broke and I bought instead of
just a new do heater controller I bought a Pegasus Astro power box the
pocket power box and this really changed everything for me because in addition to
being a do heater controller the power box has these four 12-volt outputs with
this connector and so then what I could do is instead of running a power
inverter and all these power blocks I just have my pocket power box running on
the scope and it gets power in from a battery or from AC and then all my other
devices are run out of that ok here's what a fully cable
managed system looks like with all of the cables and everything all the
devices and everything you need on top of the imaging telescope and it's using
a Nikon DSLR here a guide scope system and automated focuser that has a motor
controller up here or actually that's right that's the motor this is the
controller here's my Pegasus pocket power box here's something that controls
the timing on my DSLR and so you can see this is a lot of stuff some of the
cables are still too long um probably so uh for this one it has to be that long
because you can see that it's wired directly into the device so sometimes
you just can't get around things like that and to me it's not a about the
beauty of it so much as it is about it being really functional and fast so this
is an idea but you can see the whole thing is not a Losmandy dovetail plate
here I can turn the whole thing around there all the cables are above the plate
so it does work and again I've just been really happy with this saves me so much
time I've been so happy that I actually have bought to pocket power boxes
because I now have an Orion Atlas and the Sky Watcher eq6 are I was planning
to sell the Ryan Atlas after I got the EQ 6r but instead I was bad and just
built out another system and I can switch the cameras between these two
systems like if I want to put my z wo onto this system it's a pretty easy
change out but you can see with this system since I did not have the ability
to put the pocket power box on top of this lens what I did instead was put it
behind the cam the way I did this is I just have a
little ADM saddle there the it goes onto the mount here in the middle and
then on the front I have an ADM saddle with my guide scope and on the back I
have an ADM saddle with the pocket power box and my USB hub which controls
everything I'll talk more about this soon but this system is actually also
automated focusing now I have this Astro mechanics lense controller right here in
the middle which then feeds into the USB hub and out to the laptop so just to
show you what to cable manage systems actually look like they won't win any
beauty awards but they are very functional thanks to the power box and
just getting everything on top rather than hanging off the mountain next up in
this series I'm going to do a full review of the pocket power box going
through all its different features so I don't want to cannibalize that video too
much here and I but I just want to say that you don't have to you don't have to
get a pocket power box after watching this series of videos what I really want
to emphasize is that cable management is worth it so if you have some money and
time to put aside to do it do it now don't wait because I waited a long time
because my system just seemed to be working and so I didn't think it was
important but I wish I had done it sooner and the main reason that I wish
I'd done this sooner is the time savings I've put together a comparison here I
actually started this comparison over a year ago thinking that I would do this
video so that just gives you an idea of how long these videos can sometimes take
me to finish and so on the left here you're gonna see me setting up like I
used to where I would have
where I would have all of these cables
in this box I would take out each one
unwrap each one find out you know where it goes after a number of nights this is
basically muscle memory but it's still unplugging and plugging in a cable each
night to each device even that can be a drawback because I know from experience
that just plugging and unplugging cables a lot where's it where's those ports
down and eventually they can break for that reason or if you're doing it you
know under a red light or in darkness it's hard to actually see which way it
should go if you accidentally force it you can
break a port I know someone that that happened to so I think even that that is
another advantage is that I just keep most things plugged in now at least on
the device side I have to unplug them from the USB hub on the left this is how
I used to do it on the right this is my new system with cable management and a
pocket power box
on the right I am already done and on the left I'm still going here
so time-saving is not the only benefit for me
I run often now two systems at once to complete rigs with a mountain computer
and imaging camera blahblah guide scope and that takes up a lot of power to run
basically two times the amount of devices and so while using it my old
system with the inverter worked for just one rig one night now with two systems I
have to be more efficient with my power use and so that's another reason moving
to the power boxes is really helped because now everything is just direct
current it just goes from the battery that the power is distributed out to the
four channels and directly into the devices there's no conversion or
inversion from AC to DC DC to AC back to DC a lot of times now I'm also running
off AC power and another nice thing is the pocket power box you can buy an
adapter to run it off AC and so if I'm running off AC power then I can just
power my laptop separately off AC when I mean when I don't have AC power on the
field what I do now for my laptop so I'm not draining that big battery too much
is I just bought one of these big lithium-ion USB C batteries and I can
run my laptop internal battery down for a ways and then run it off this for
another five or six hours and so this works really well okay here at the end I
just want to briefly mention I'm this video is basically basically just been
showing my journey with cable management what which to summarize was dropping all
of my old power blocks and inverter and all that and moving to the pocket power
box system getting shorter cables putting everything on top of the scope
if that doesn't if that kind of solution doesn't work for you there's still other
ways to work on cable management one easy thing is to just get all of
your cables that are running off your scope in two together like this get one
of these or get a lot of these velcro straps and then every eight inches or so
just wrap all of your cables together like this and so then they're all
running off is one big thing that you can sort of see rather than a waterfall
of cables all coming off and you can route these down so that they're not
going to interfere with anything that the mount is doing I've seen a lot of
cool pictures of people who have done that kind of system for cable management
online it looks really neat okay so that's it for this video I'm just going
to keep it short just sort of showing you my journey with cable management but
this is actually gonna be a series of three videos this is the first one the
second one is my review of the packet power box and the third one is showing
you how to make a custom travel box for your scope and imaging rig once you've
done all of this cable management because the one thing that I didn't
really think through is that after I have all of the cables set up on top of
my scope it makes it in some ways a little bit more fragile right because I
don't have any kind of case now that can contain all of that so what I was doing
when I first started was I was just like putting like pillows around it and
trying to like seatbelt it in and I had an almost disaster with that where the
scope jolted forward because I don't think there was enough weight for the
seat belt to really keep it in its place and it could have been much worse
I broke I think one USB cable that way but that really motivated me to build
out a case so that I could keep everything with the cables all intact on
top of the scope but it would be safe for travel and so all talk through how I
built that case it's sort of an instruction instructable video so that
you can build a case for your system if you're interested as well all right
thanks for watching and hope everyone is having clear skies so far in 2020
Thank you