I am just starting to use the iOptron iPolar with my SkyGuider. I noticed that I can not set the exposure time for the iPolar above 0.5 seconds. Is this a limit I inadvertently set? Or is this a limit of the iPolar?
At the moment the iPolar driver is simply an alias for the V4L (video for linux) driver because that was the only one that worked with the iPolar that I could test with. However, I never really got it working and I didn’t continue trying.
Do you get images using the iPolar driver? Unfortunately I don’t have one at my disposal at the moment so I cannot continue trying to get it to work.
Yes, I can take images using the iPolar camera with my RPI4 Stellarmate/Ekos . I took the attached image a couple of days ago with 0.5 seconds. As you can see, this image is not sufficient for plate solving, hence polar alignment is not possible. That's why I am trying to increase the exposure time. I did also take some images today (daytime, inside) using the same equipment. What puzzled me with the images I took is that the 0.5 seconds image looks just like the 0.001 seconds image. I don't understand why that is. I also uploaded the output of a verbose "lsusb" just FYI. Please let me know if and how I can help to improve the iPolar support in Ekos.
iOptron have released an iOS app for iPolar and I am trying to find out if there are Linux and Mac drivers for it that we may include in Ekos. Haven’t found an answer though so if you could help there then that would be very welcome!
I haven't had a chance to experiment on a Mac, but I did some experiments with a Windows system. It appears that the iPolar is supported on Windows with the plain "usbvideo" driver. Also, the iOptron app lets you only choose an exposure between 0.1ms and 500ms.
Unfortunately, outside is nothing but clouds. I would love to do a side-by-side comparison between the Windows app and Ekos.
I managed to polar align using INDI and PHD2 using the PDA method with the ipolar. i could just about make out anough of a star pattern for it to do its thing.
500ms (0.5) seconds is the hardware maximum i believe.Its the maximum time you can set on the windoze app.