Well at least you are getting something! Congrats on the effort.

Yeah, setting this up is extremely fragile and tiresome. The vanilla stellarmate seems to include a version of libcamera from 2022, which is pretty old. And each time you apt-update something, you'll end up with that version again and you have to select it all over again:

<code>
stellarmate@astroberry:~/astro/indi_pylibcamera $ sudo apt list libcamera0
Listing... Done
libcamera0/unknown,now 1.0-stable~202211161314 arm64 [installed,automatic]
libcamera0/oldstable 0~git20230720+bde9b04f-1 armhf
stellarmate@astroberry:~ $ sudo apt list libcamera-dev
Listing... Done
libcamera-dev/unknown,now 1.0-stable~202211161314 arm64 [installed]
libcamera-dev/oldstable 0~git20230720+bde9b04f-1 armhf
stellarmate@astroberry:~ $ sudo apt list libcamera-apps
Listing... Done
libcamera-apps/oldstable,now 1.2.1-1 arm64 [installed]
libcamera-apps/oldstable 1.2.1-1 armhf
</code>

But I had the same hassle when installing the picamera driver, so it might be a general package problem. For now I "fixed" at least part of this by doing

<code>sudo apt install libcamera-dev/oldstable libcamera0/oldstable </code>

which kinda, sorta worked but I still can't compile the indi driver when usiing the libcamera-apps libs. I got the same errors in LibCameraApps as the rest of the folks and don't want to use the one that has uses the included code. That seems like a dead end as you can't reasonably package it.

But at least with the IMX290 the python driver also hangs every few shots... if I have time, I'll try to make a version that supports the libcamera-apps utils like libcamera-still and the like as I hope that you'll be able to more easily kill an extra process as opposed to constantly having to restart the driver. But that will take time since I just started.

I can update libcamera to the latest package in StellarMate. However, the indi-libcamera driver still bundles parts of libcamera/libcamera-apps which should be external dependencies. Once this happens, we can maintain both libcamera and if necessary libcamera-apps as external libraries (update to latest stable or GIT master releases).

Make sure that the v4l2 ccd driver works though. Mine crashed when doing exposures after switching the libs

Hm, actually I retried yesterday (very lightly) and the V4L2 driver didn't crash.

Also, I wasn't having any success with the python driver. It would take one image of 1s and then hang. the libcamera-foo apps worked though.

Frankly, at this point I would like to go back to my original idea of having a generic python driver that just calls an external tool. Apparently having one process for a lot of exposures is extremely fragile...

@Anjo
Am I right that you mean the 'indi_pylibcamera' driver when you speak about the Python driver? If so, please open an issue in github.com/scriptorron/indi_pylibcamera and provide more details for debugging.

Thank you.

Here you go: github.com/scriptorron/indi_pylibcamera/issues/53

It only happens with the IMX290, at least not a Raspi V1 camera I also tested (which apparently can do only 1s though anyway).

Hi Jasem,

to make this clear: if you can update the driver without any larger hassle, I'd be happy if you could do so. I don't know what I saw with the V4L2 driver, but it seems to be gone.

But I have no idea how v4l2 and libcamera work together and what component is building on what...

I'm not sure how V4L2 is related to INDI Libcamera driver? they're two different drivers and share nothing in common.

If you're confident you can do this, please do so

Ok, just went through 19 pages of development ramblings. Currently it seems most development has halted, still I'm not sure what the best path there is to walk.
So, for what I understand there is a libcamera integration in indi-3rdparty here: github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty/blob/master/indi-libcamera/
And there is also an alternative in python: github.com/scriptorron/indi_pylibcamera. The latter uses the pylibcamera python library.

As the first option is directly integrated into indi-3rd party, where the alternative will never be, I'd expect the first option to be most favored. However it seems there have been many issues with it, and not a lot of patches have been submitted so I'm not sure if everything has been addressed. Also, I had a quick look at the sources, I'm not entirely sure why the entire libcamera-apps has been copied into indi-3rdparty, it seems as if no-one ever gave it a proper clean-up so far. Am I correct in those assumptions?

Also please note that libcamera-apps is about to be renamed into rpicam-apps, as those are maintained entirely by the RPI Foundation while libcamera isn't.

I already resumed work on indi-libcamera and if all goes well, we'll have a functional driver in the next INDI release next week. It is based on rpicam-apps so it will only be available for bookworm.