This driver is now available in StellarMate:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install indi-rpicam

In reading this post, I came across this website:

astronomy.robpettengill.org/astroRPi.html

The quality he was able to coax out of the rpicam back in 2016 blows my mind. Look at the image he got of Jupiter and compare that to the result he got with a ZWO. The new 12 MP camera should easily be on par then.

I bought and installed stellarmate. After installing indi-rpicam, when I start it with indiserver -v, the result is the same as the compiled version from astroberry.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I didn't figure out why I couldn't enable it from the command line, but I was able to enable it from the INDI Control Panel and then open PHD2 and start streaming images to it.

Is it still a 1 second limit for the exposures?

-Jim

Ok, seems the actual binary is missing for some reason. Ill have a look at it.

Yes, there should be no HW-limit to that 1sec as far as I know but the documentation for this camera is very sparse. Ill keep trying to increase the time.

The binary is not missing, it should be

not indi-rpicam. This is why you can use KStars/PHD2 to start it since the binary is correct there.

It's remarkable how much better things work when you type the right commands. I've got it working on both platforms now, but like that I had a good excuse to buy Stellarmate.

Thanks for the help! I'm excited to see what this little camera can do as a guide scope and as a planetary imaging camera.
-Jim

I was planning to invest in a guide camera and was think the pi Hq cam would be a good option.

Was wondering what your experience is with this sensor?

I see the driver is not piggybacked on raspstill but natively use MMAL. How long does it take to process a 1 second exposure? Also I noticed a fixme comment on the source code for exposures longer than 1 sec. May I ask what is the limitarion with that?

The pi hq cams are all out of stock atm, with stock expected later next week I believe. Any feedback would be appreciated wrt guiding.

Hi, the total time is quite a lot longer than 1 second but I can't test it now. The limit of exposure time though is fixed and works now.
Regards, Lars

May I ask if it is sensitive enough for auto guiding. But if it takes long, it may not be ideal anyway. Thanks for letting me know.

I have not tried that. To work as a good guidecamera I need to implement subframing first, that way the loop-time should be better. I does seem to be quite sensitive, with back illumination and all but I have not tested myself yet but I will.