Image Acquisition in PixInsight (Was: When will Pixinsight...)

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi David

Do you think that adding Canon support is too difficult? I would gladly help you testing with those cameras. Also I have an Orion SSAG, if you ever implement it.

[David Raphael]

So Canon support exists on Windows for 32-bit PixInsight 1.7 - it was added a while back by Klaus. 

I know that, when he implemented it, there was no 64 bit Canon SDK.  It now looks like they have some Beta support with a 64-bit SDK.  I personally don't own a Canon DSLR, so it will be hard for me to contribute in this regard.

If I ever decide to write a 32-64-bit bridge driver for PixInsight on Windows to support ASCOM - then the SSAG will be supported. 

Sorry for the less-than-great answer


Cheers,
Dave

[Carlos Milovic]

don't worry

Btw, I use linux mainly, so if you ever make the port there, you'll have my eternal gratitude.

[vicent_peris]

Hi David,

I have a FLI camera, I can test everything as soon as you have the drivers ready.

Best regards,
Vicent.

[kkretzsch]

Hi all,
due to the restricted platform support of the Canon SDK I started to work on an integration of an INDI client into PixInsight. Prerequisite is a running INDI server on a Linux or Mac  machine and devices which are supported by INDI. With the integrated client you can connect to the INDI server on the same machine or remotely on another machine.  My prototype supports:

- Windows , Linux, MacOs
- receiving and sending device properties to the INDI server to control the devices which are connected to the server
- receiving and sending device properties to the INDI server via the Javascript engine

The INDI client process holds a native INDI client as a singleton to which other  processes can connect to. With that it is possible to write simple convenience apps like frame aquisitions or telescope control. For example I used the Image Solver script to get object coordinates online for telescope control.

It seems to work quite well, at least "I eat my own-dog food" and use my prototype every night when the wheather allows me to do so. However the prototype is still a prototype and not usable for productive use, e.g. behaviour when the INDI server crashes is currently not so good ...

If there are some Linux users who want to test my prototype let me know. Then I will try to allocate some time to fix the most critical issues.

 Cheers,
Klaus
 

[vicent_peris]

Hi Klaus,

I would be interested in testing your software, I have some Canon cameras available.

Best regards,
Vicent.

[kkretzsch]

Hi Vicent,
OK great, I'll first upgrade to the latest PI version and do some testing. For Canon cameras you'll need to install the INDI gphoto driver (indi_gphoto_ccd). This driver supports not only Canon but also a large set (>1000) of other Camera models (Nikon,Sony,Olympus,...). If you have a CCD camera, here is a list of all CCD cameras (SBIG, ATIK,FLI, ...) supported by INDI

http://www.indilib.org/devices/ccds.html

they should also work with my prototype.  I'll come back as soon as I have finished testing and written some documentation on how to install and use the whole setup.

Cheers,
Klaus

[David Raphael]

Ok - I am trying to figure something out with regards to dialogs.  I want my driver to be able to provide a PixInsight Dialog for configuring the driver settings.   However, I'm running into problems that I think are related to the fact that I probably can't instantiate a pcl::Dialog inside of my driver.

I assume this has something to do with the fact that the memory allocator won't work correctly inside of a loaded library that isn't managed directly by PixInsight's main UI thread. 

Am I correct in assuming I won't be able to simply instantiate a Dialog inside of my driver code?   Any suggestions on how to approach this?

[David Raphael]

Ok - after thinking about it a bit more...I'm thinking that my driver *can* return a type that could then be instantiated by the interface...

anyways...I'll tinker a bit more and see if I can figure it out...