Review: Pegasus Astro Pocket Powerbox

Hi everyone this is Nico Carver my website is at nebulaphotos.com and today I will be reviewing the Pegasus Astro pocket power box, as I said in my cable management video which I suggest you watch first I got this device when my previous dew heater controller broke just one day it just didn’t work anymore and I was shopping for a new dew heater controller and realized I really only needed two channels one for my guide scope and one for my imaging scope and so I was looking for different dew heater controllers I came across the pocket power box somehow and I just had two channels but then I had all this extra stuff built in. It had a environmental sensor, it had a DSLR power output, it had four 12-volt power outputs so if you’re not understanding why all those things are exciting we’re gonna go ahead into all of that in this video but it really even though I was just shopping for this simple thing I spent a little bit more and got so much more I love this device I have it on two setups now one for my lens base setups and one for my main telescope setup okay the first thing I want to talk about is it comes with this this is an environmental sensor its senses or it measures both the air temperature and the relative humidity and by knowing the air temperature and the relative humidity you can get the dew point that’s important because comparing the dew point to the air temperature you can know when it is going to form and so if there’s no risk of dew forming it can really turn down the power that it’s sending to those dew bands substantially if there is more of a risk of heavy dew then it increases the the power the heat and so what this does in effect is it saves you your battery and even if you have a huge battery it’s it’s always better to put less strain on the battery so I like this feature it’s also just fun in their software they have a little client and you can just graph and watch the temperature and the dew point move over the night oh and I’ll just say that my previous dew heater controller didn’t have this and so each night I’d have to sort of guess what to set it at which is sort of annoying with this now I just put it on auto dew you set that up in the software the first time and as soon as you set it up on auto dew then every time you start up the pocket power box again it remembers that setting so I don’t even have to open the software I could literally just turn on the pocket power box and it would start using this environmental sensor to automatically control the dew heater bands so well I got this for do control the power management features of this device have turned out to be even more important to me because like I said in an account cable management video this is what just got me to actually take care of my mess of cables coming off my mount and get them all on top of the scope and it’s really only through the pocket power box that I was able to do that I will get into other devices that would allow you to do that at the end of the video but for me it was the packet power box that made me finally manage my cables another thing other than cable management that moving to this device meant is that I wasn’t being wildly inefficient anymore if I brought out my big battery what I was doing was I was taking that big battery running a power inverter so I’m going from DC to AC direct current to alternating current then I was out of the power inverter I was running all of these power adapters to go from AC back to DC to power all my different devices so one this is just a ton of stuff to bring out onto the field each one of those power adapters weighs a couple pounds that inverter where you weighed 10 pounds and it’s just other than the weight it’s just a bunch of stuff to carry out with this the device is literally taking care of what the inverter and all of those power adapters used to do and it’s all on my scope now so you can just imagine how I just wasn’t really thinking before that wow this is gonna replace so many things that I have to bring out there and worry about and might break so it’s just been great in that sense the last really neat thing that I want to talk about that I’ve actually I didn’t I got when I got this device I was just using it with my z wo camera so I wasn’t using this feature but it’s the DSLR 8 volt power output now I have bought the Nikon and Canon couplers from Pegasus and so I can now use this with Canon and Nikon cameras and it’s just really nice to not have to worry with your DSLR about changing out the internal battery you just never know when it’s gonna run out I find that those indicators aren’t that accurate and so just to run power off of the power box has been great too because I can just run a DSLR all night leave it forget about it if you have automated focusing then you can really forget about it and I’ll just mention that Pegasus Astro makes these power couplers they just basically fit into the battery compartment and then run a wire out they make them for most Canon models most Nikon models some Sony models and some Fuji models so if you have any of those cameras check out Pegasus Astros website or one of the resellers and you can look for those so I’ve gone through a bunch of the features that I really like about this product and I want to make this a fair review and actually go through some of the drawbacks or things that I didn’t like and I I’ll be upfront that I don’t think that these drawbacks are necessarily pegasus Astros fault they’re just something that I wasn’t expecting with the product or sort of gotchas that I think people should be aware of the first is that when I bought the product it really emphasized online that it came with all the different cables that you need to run it so in addition to coming with this environmental sensor it came with a USB cable so this is - you need to run this to your computer somehow so that the software works after you set it up the first time if you wanted to get rid of this and not use it anymore you could but I like actually running a software just connecting making sure that I can see that it’s working and the other nice thing about running the software through the USB cable is then you can send commands to the power box through your computer if you want to so why would you ever want to do that well they you can actually turn off and on the different 12 volt volt power outputs one by one or all at the same time you can turn off and on the DSLR so this is just cool it’s like you can reset a device in the field without actually having to get out there and unplug and plug back in so I’ve used that a couple times it’s also just nice to see that it’s working so I recommend using a USB cable I’m getting to what I didn’t like about them sell the cable sorry it’s a little bit long-winded gear the thing that I didn’t like about them supplying all of the power cables and the USB cable is that I’m guessing most people who use the power box want to put everything onto the scope or onto the mount and they really don’t need cables this long this one’s even longer to do that they want shorter cables so basically I got this device and I’m not using any of the cables that came with it just which just feels sort of wasteful I’m gonna keep them all in the box here just in case I ever resell or need them for some reason but I bought all shorter cables that made more sense with how I was setting it up so I don’t fault them for supplying the cables and it makes sense that they’re making them longer because with a longer Kable you can at least connect if it was too short you’re never gonna be able to do anything with it so I understand the choice but I didn’t end up using any of the cables that the device came with I just used the power box and the environmental sensor and right replaced all the other cables okay the other thing about cables that I didn’t get when I bought this is I looked at my devices and I measured I just quickly with a ruler I measured the diameter of the ports of my different devices and the power ports and they all seemed like they would work with the cables that came with it or cables that I was going to buy that are shorter they’re called 2.1 millimeter ports what I didn’t realize is that the diameter of the pin inside that port can vary and so different devices I have don’t actually work with this cable or the new cables that I bought based on this and so after the fact I finally was putting everything together and it just like wouldn’t fit and I was like what’s happening so I looked it up and realized that yeah the center pin can be a different diameter - the good thing is there are adapters you can buy so instead of having to buy a whole new cable you can just buy a little adapter that goes on top of this and so that’s what I did okay the last drawback for some is that this is a $200 accessory and if you buy some of the extras like the AC adapter if you want to run the whole thing off AC power that’s another 65 if you want to buy one of the couplers for your DSLR that’s another 20 so it’s not cheap but a lot of things in deep sky Astro photography aren’t cheap I think it’s fully worth that price but the other thing I found is that I’ve shown this to people and it’s sort of like when you’re looking at it it’s just like well this is just a little plastic box with some power inputs why is this $200 because it doesn’t seem it doesn’t seem like substantial but they made it lightweight for a reason because they knew that it was gonna go on top of people’s scopes and really I feel like what you’re paying for is the design which takes a lot of time and the software which has worked flawlessly so I don’t feel that the price is unjustified but for some that would be a drawback the only way that I have seen to do power management cheaper than this like you know proper power management is to home brew your own solution and probably the cheapest way to do it is to buy a power distribution block from like a Chinese company I’ll show one right here and put the link in my description if you’re interested in this idea and then you can buy what are called anderson power poles and they’re just these little connectors that work with this distribution block and what you would do is you would find you would round up all your cables and cut off the ends and put on crimp on the anderson power poles and then run it directly like that i was thinking about doing this i do not want to wreck all my cables when i when i looked into buying new cables and the power distribution block and all the other little things you have to do get with this i realized that it was gonna run me about as much as the packet power box you might find that you can do it for cheaper i know that people who do a lot of DIY projects often can can do things cheaper because they know where to find things or they buy things used so i’m not saying it’s impossible to go cheaper than 2-hundred with the anderson power pole idea but the other thing that didn’t really appeal to me about it is that for instance with my lens setup I’m trying to think keep things pretty lightweight and that that distribution block I think was heavier it just seemed like they’d really thought through how to make the Pegasus Astro as useful as possible by while still keeping it lightweight okay other alternatives most of these are more expensive than the Pegasus option but I just want to go through them real quick there is the Dew Buster this is a classic device it’s us-made I’ve seen a lot of people use it and be really happy with it has a nice warranty it provides lots of do options so if you have a complicated setup like with like you want something for your secondary mirror your primary mirror and you want a bunch of different dew heater bands this might be a better product for you it only I think in the classic design provides two 12-volt power outputs while the pocket power box offers four but I’ve just heard good things about it I’ve heard it’s really well made so you could also look at the Dew Buster I think it starts at $250 there’s also the ultimate power box from Pegasus Astro I was considered this but it’s a pretty substantial increase in price and most of the features I didn’t need right now it might be nice to put all the USB ports into one device rather than having my separate USB hub but honestly a separate USB hub has been working great for me I have had no problems with just this simple anchor 7 port USB 3 hub it is powered by the pocket power box which I think you Alois for this kind of for astrophotography I always look at a powered hub and lastly and this is just going to replace tons of things for you if you go this route including the laptop the computer is the eagle from prima Luce lab this thing does all the things that the power box does plus it is a high-performing wind 10 computer and all kinds of bells and whistles so if you’re interested in just something that’s like really turnkey and has all kinds of features you might go in that direction but to wrap up for me this is the perfect device it’s very flexible I can move it from set up to set up but I found that now that I wanting to run two setups at times that I did want to so I bought two of these and it really just does everything that I want it to do and nothing more if you have a setup that’s a little bit more complex or you are making something more permanent like an observatory you might want one of these higher-end products but for me this is perfect I just set it and forget it it’s really just become so easy to use that I really don’t even think about it it just manages my power it manages the do it has cleaned up my cables and now I can just get out there put my scope on the mount plug in a couple things and start imaging so to wrap up this review was not sponsored I bought my two Pegasus Astro Pocket power boxes with my own money and I just really liked the product so I wanted to review it if you have any ideas for future reviews that you really want me to do sooner than later you can let me know in the comments and thank you so much for watching my channel if you’re not subscribed please subscribe if you really are enjoying these videos feel free to check out my patreon and you can support me on there as well alright thanks everyone clear skies .