Here is a newbie question...
I have been exploring indi kstars ekos and phd2. I have a Canon EOS 1100D camera and find that ekos supports both streaming and picture taking. However when trying out PHD2 I find that PHD2 does not recognise the .stream image output so streaming does not work but individual pictures seem to work. I also have an Alba 10M pixel webcam that I have stripped down to attach to my various lenses to take image. Now Alba seems totally unsupported by PHD2 (INDI Webcam) but again is fully supported in ekos. I am purchasing an OpenAstroGuider V3 with the IMX290 sensor with the hope that this is fully supported in PHD2 (INDI Webcam).

Here is my question... given that INDI Webcam seems to work well with ekos and Canon DSLR seems to also work with ekos... how much software effort is needed to support my camera's in PHD2? I have seen the git repos at github.com/knro and that seems to be the best place to start with development of my camera interfaces. I would just be focusing on PHD2 code and work in a Linux Ubuntu environment. I have used QT so wxWidgets dont scare me too much, I have used OpenCV.... so.... where to start!?

Hi Peter,

PHD2 is its own entity, not supported by Kstars/Ekos. You should probably ask your question to those folks:
openphdguiding.org

You could fork the PHD2 code and create your own version with your changes but then of course it would no longer be PHD2.

The Ekos internal guider is very similar to PHD2 and has broadly the same functionality. Since your cameras are supported by Ekos everything should work fine. Is there something in PHD2 you are specifically after that is unavailable in the Ekos internal guider?

PHD2 supports INDI Streaming... maybe this broke recently? File a bug with PHD2.

I found a very good description of the various drift alignment procedures see for example - sites.google.com/site/openphdguiding/phd2-drift-alignment

I can see kstars has the guiding part and a limited set of drift alignment procedures however I was just looking at phd2 because it seemed to have more comprehensive instructions. - I don't intend to use Astrometry.net and plate solving as part of the alignment process just yet... trying to learn about one thing at a time!. I can also run phd2 on its own without any other distractions.

I will continue investigating / building phd2.. perhaps my version 2.6.11.rev20230530-0ppa1~ubuntu20.04 is too far out of date and has bugs that are now fixed.

Peter.

When using indi in phd2, there is an option to control the use of streaming ( force it, prevent it). Worth a try in your case.

Hi!
I am a novice user and I have great difficulties at every step.
I really want to install on my raspbian, to work with Ekos. Are there detailed guides for installing it?
Thank you!

as a novice user on Linux.. self install can usually teach you a lot!

This has a high chance of success for you:
<code>sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indi-full gsc
</code>

Here is a good general instruction - www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/os.html

But that is just the start. I depends what camera mount you are going to use and what camera and ..... I have an OpenAstroTracker wiki.openastrotech.com/en/OpenAstroTracker kit purchased from www.astroshop.eu/camera-mounts/openastro...ker-diy-goto/p,70674.. Now with that mount the LX200 instructions used to tell the mount where to move to get confused if you allow the kstars to drive the mount so you have to allow the mount to do the moving so you have to Disable Time and Location updating in kstars {Settings; Configure-KStars ; INDI}.. The confusion comes from the use of the date line (180 degrees offset from meridian) and the meridian as reference positions.. the Meade protocol (LX200) Set Site Longitude camera mount expects 179W is 359 and 179E is 1 from 180 at Greenwich... but LX200 sends 179W is -179 and 179E is 179 from 0 at Greenwich... So to fix it you Disable Time and Location updating in kstars {Settings; Configure-KStars ; INDI}...

Point being if you have a good read about your configuration and your equipment you can find out all sorts of interesting stuff! Without knowing what you have there is no way of knowing how to help you!

If you feel like getting more of a helping hand then www.astroberry.io/ might be good for you.. I have not used astroberry but basically they take some version of raspberry pi OS and install lots of good stuff for you....

Even better for you perhaps is www.ggiuliani.ch/blog/?tag=ccdciel - there you will find lots of instructions about how to do lots of things with raspberry pi..

Good luck with your experiments!

If anyone stumbles upon this thread and is interested.. PHD2 is easy to compile...
My initial guess was that the "Unsupported type or read error loading FITS file" message I got came from the cfitsio library.. so I build the latest cfitsio library and PHD2 code and found the same problems.
Next step was to look at phd2/cam_indi.cpp where the error occurs and I find that the HDU number of axis is expected to be 2.. with INDI Webcam and the IMX290 USB camera I am using OpenAstroGuider with 2.9u pixel size the fits file has NAXIS = 3 / number of data axes .. so the phd2 code can't handle this type of image.
Now I am using Linux so I can look at what the sensor supports:
/dev/video0 Index : 0 Pixel Format: 'MJPG' Discrete 1920x1080 .. 1280x720 .. 640x480 .. 320x240 : 15, 20, 25, 30 fps
/dev/video0 Index : 1 Pixel Format: YUYV 4:2:2 Discrete 640x480 .. 320x240 : 30.000 fps
/dev/video2 Index : 0 Pixel Format: 'H264' Discrete 1920x1080 .. 1280x720 .. 640x480 .. 320x240 : 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 fps

INDI Webcam seems to find it difficult to select /dev/video0 Index : 0 so by default it give me Pixel Format: YUYV 4:2:2.. - unfortunate because I only get 640x480 images.... working on that at the moment.

Anyway back to phd2.. simply by changing the code to accept NAXIS = 3 allows me to at least see an image in phd2 and allows the loop exposures to work so it will be interesting to see how I get on with the guiding part!!