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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

New INDI Atik driver - Feedback requested

  • Posts: 18
  • Thank you received: 4
Hello,
I use yesterday for the first time this new driver. It is very good to have a free driver for atik.
I schedule poses of 300s.
The images stops after 30 exposures (But it was time to sleep).
I don't now why, I will look at the logs.
Anyway, it is a good news to have a free atik driver.
Jean-Jacques
5 years 3 months ago #32557

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I'm a little confused & dismayed over all this....

There has been a free & fully functioning INDI Atik driver for quite some time from Peter @ Cloudmakers (which I have been using very successfully with my Atik 16200 & Atik EFW )

Why the need to duplicate effort and go through all the laborious testing & fixing when one is already around?

At the very least, a collaboration between Jasem & Peter (who is a member & contributor here) would have cut down on all this testing?

As now, any re-compile I have to do will require that I specifically disable the GIT Atik branch in order to retain what I know already does what I need!

Phil
Last edit: 5 years 3 months ago by Phil Shepherd.
5 years 3 months ago #32561

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There is a fundamental and very important difference between free and open source software. Contributing new features or fixes directly is not possible in close source case, so it's all pending on the sole author, all you can do is report issues and wishes and hope for the best. When the author stops supporting the driver, it works as long as the environment happens to be similar and so on. Before this I used Peter's driver for a couple of years and it mostly worked (and I reported the issues I had) but had issues with old libraries being required and so on, which would have been trivial to fix had it been open sourced, but couldn't in a fixed binary release that would need to work on multiple OS versions.

There was a similar situation with Peter's USB_FocusV3 driver which for some reason wasn't open sourced unlike many of his other drivers (for example SX driver I also use), and never worked correctly in Raspberry Pi due to compiler issues so I wrote my own (by coincidence there was another driver written for it around the same time which was more polished so that one is included in INDI and I dropped my own version and improved that one instead, another good thing about open source).

One technical improvement is that this new driver uses Atik's own SDK (as does Peter's new open source INDIGO driver, but his old INDI driver did not) which should make it easier to support new camera models and benefits from fixes and features Atik makes for their Windows drivers and so on.

So while I'm very grateful for Peter's work I'm also very happy about this open source driver.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Eric
5 years 3 months ago #32562

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I of course understand these differences... and fully understand your points (& in general agree)... Although not a C++ programmer, I managed to write a focuser driver and decided to pass it onto here as a contribution.

But surely some of the issues and/or difficulties being experienced now might have been avoided if a collaboration was attempted at the start?

I am curious - Did anyone contact Peter?

(apologies for going off topic)
Last edit: 5 years 3 months ago by Phil Shepherd.
5 years 3 months ago #32564

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As far as I know Jasem did talk with Peter multiple times about this but there was some IPR issue with the camera SDK used. But this is just my recollection from discussions with Jasem, so it would be better if either of them commented directly.

As far as these current difficulties are concerned, at least the ones I fixed (temperature reading while downloading image and abort flushing) had more to do with the Atik SDK which the old driver doesn't use so while it would have obviously been good to have more collaboration, it might not have made much difference. All in all I was actually very pleasantly surprised how well the driver worked already in its initial version and have been using it ever since, but it could also just be that working as a programmer I'm probably more pessimistic about software in general than usual :)
5 years 3 months ago #32566

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Fair do's... should't really comment on other people's conversations..

Have Atik come back regarding their SDK? I do know one of the guys from there if you need me to give them a kick?

Phil
5 years 3 months ago #32567

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Yes, I got reply back from their support and a new version of the SDK that fixed the abort issue, with some additional fixing on the INDI driver side, both are in git now.
5 years 3 months ago #32568

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5 years 3 months ago #32569

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So I have installed this new driver (removed the other one).

root@heidenrod-obs:~# dpkg -l | grep indi-atik
ii indi-atik 2.0~201811230011~ubuntu18.04.1 armhf INDI Driver for Atik cameras and filter wheels.
ii indi-atik-dbg 2.0~201811230011~ubuntu18.04.1 armhf INDI Driver for Atik cameras and filter wheels.
root@heidenrod-obs:~#

one thing that I'm missing is the atik-test tool. Is it there somewhere or has it been removed/not implemented?
5 years 3 months ago #32641

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It was only part of the older binary driver as testing tool for the older SDK. It doesn't work with the new Atik SDK, nor do we have source for it so it's not included.
5 years 3 months ago #32657

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It worked for 5 min or less, then I am unable to take any pictures out of my 314 now.
All I get is the following:


As I was doing a polar alignment, fighting the clouds, I have not taken any logs what-so-ever.
5 years 3 months ago #32682
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Weird, unfortunately I don't have that camera, only 383L and I run on x64 so would need logs to say anything useful... One thing to check is to make sure the driver reports API version 110, which is the current SDK, then it should be up to date otherwise too.
5 years 3 months ago #32692

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