Installation

INDI ZWO ASI driver is available for download as a 3rd party driver from INDI's download page. Under Ubuntu, you can install it via:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install indi-asi

Features

This is the INDI driver for the ZWO Optics ASI cameras and filter wheels. It supports all models. The camera must be powered and connected before you run the INDI driver.

Operation

You can set the exposure time, and control cameras properties including gain, offset, brightness..etc. Other parameters include USB bandwidth control and auto adjustments. For example on ARM systems it's advised to set a value of 40 if you find problems with many broken frames.

Once you're connected, you can capture images as FITS from the camera, control temperature, and set image binning and frame subset. The driver will automatically upload these images to the client in FITS format.

You can enable video streaming which is only available in the Luma video format. It can record videos in SER format. You can set the exposure time for the video stream in the Streaming tab.

For models equipped with ST4 port, the driver supports pulse guiding.

Issues

The ASICameras are very USB bandwidth hungry when running at high FPS. If you see "broken frames" with more that one of them running, keep in mind this important aspect. ASI Cameras continuously generate frames and they are buffered in the driver. To avoid having frames with old parameters when these are changed, a flushing mechanism is employed. It looks OK, but if you find any problem with parameters changes not being immediately applied please report. USB 2.0 ASI Firmware used wrong USB packet size that caused issues with Linux.

Firmware Update

16 bit images from USB2 cameras can fail on some embedded systems. Furthermore, connecting two cameras to one embedeed device or computer might also lead to capture failures. One possible solution is to flash the camera's firmware to compatible mode. This resolves most of the issues with controlling the camera. You need to download the ASI Cameras Firmware Upgrade Tool and flash your camera firmware. Select the appropiate -compatible firmware for your camera model. This procedure is not necessary for USB3 cameras.

There are no known bugs for this driver. If you found a bug, please report it at INDI's bug tracking system at SourceForge. (You can log in with a variety of existing accounts, including Google, Yahoo and OpenID.)