Blaise,

All is well here. The world has gone crazy, but I try not to pay much attention. One of my students soloed today and didn't crash, so all is well.

It looks like you have made real progress. I hope SVBONY is responsive to your questions. I look forward to more testing when it is required.

The new AstroDMx_Capture program beta for Pi4 64 bit is out now and the SVBONY camera seems to work very well with the new SDK in that environment. A good time to be into astronomy, I think.

Hello Jon,

Glad to know your student is safe

I'm on vacation among my brother. Nice place. The nearest city is at 20 miles...



I tried the driver on Saturn yesterday :



Maksutov 127/1900 + SV305
About 1000 root frames

Have I nice day !

Blaise

Blaise,

Very nice Saturn! Nice area shot too!

That is a more astronomy-friendly area than around here. We are more "woodsy" and trees block the horizon at every compass point. I can't view anything below about 35 degrees, and that's from a second floor deck.

Does this mean your latest version is ready for me to try to break?

Hi Jon,

Right, I love this place. I'm looking for a land to buy out there. The sky is really clear. These kind of deserts are pretty rare in France.
Did you try the "lighter" or "matches" solutions, to get ride off all these trees ? You will get a clean area...
You may also drop some gasoline from your giroplan... Oups...

Sure, you can test the driver. Sources are in a new branch :

github.com/thx8411/indi-3rdparty/tree/thx8411_sv305_2

These are the known issues :

+ Subframing and binning don't work in liveview
+ First frame wrong exposure time
+ Can't abort exposure yet
+ sometime, gain setting failed.

Thanks a lot !

I'm still waiting for the SVBony engineers answers.

I also tested the driver on Jupiter last night.

Best regards !

Blaise

Hmmm....the dreaded "Your architecture isn't supported message from my Pi this time in the attempted compile of libsv305. This is the new aarch64 version of Raspbian (beta) on the Pi4. I think last time I used the Ubuntu Server 20.04 on the Pi.

What are you compiling on? (Nice shot of Jupiter!)

Hi Jon,

Platform detection isn't so easy.
I only have a PI 2 and a PI B+ by myself.
Only tested on PI 2 at this time.

Could you type "uname -a" on your PI 4 ?

Best regards !

Blaise

PS : Great vacations for me. Great sky. Shooted Neowise on monday and M51 yesterday.

Blaise,

I had a "brain in the off position" error. My original testing was on an X86_64 Ubuntu laptop. It originally compiled there, and I had been testing with my guide scope on a tripod. The Skywatcher 250P is driven by a Pi4, now running the (beta) Raspbian verson for that machne as follows:

jon@piscope:~ $ uname -a
Linux piscope 5.4.51-v8+ #1326 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jul 17 10:58:13 BST 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux
jon@piscope:~ $ lscpu
Architecture: aarch64
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
Vendor ID: ARM
Model: 3
Model name: Cortex-A72
Stepping: r0p3
CPU max MHz: 1500.0000
CPU min MHz: 600.0000
BogoMIPS: 108.00
Flags: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
jon@piscope:~ $

It would be nice to run it there, but not mandatory. I have started testing on the Laptop version, and it compiles without issue (again).

Oh...by the way...from your previous iteration of the indi_sv305_ccd driver:



I have @#$@#! TREES in the way for NeoWise!!! I may have to drive up on a mountain top to get a shot of it.

Great job! Any update on the driver? is it ready to be submitted to INDI 3rdparty repository? armhf + arm64 are now supported as well?

Works pretty well on X86_64. I haven't had a good compile on arm64 or armhf yet. It is possible there has been some uploads I haven't been aware of yet.

Hello,

Sorry being so silent these last days. Back from vacations, and my wife is at the hospital (nothing really serious, but annoying...), and I have to manage the children all the day by myself
A Very time consuming job !

@Jon

Your Jupiter is really great ! I wish I shot this kind of pictures ! What's your setup ?
Thanks for the "uname". I just pushed a fix. I hope it will work.

@knro

The new version of the driver is almost finished. Comparing to the previous one :

- 2 regressions :
* a bit less stable : some issues with the new SVBONY APIs ? No answers from SVBONY at this time.
* exposure abort disabled : I didn't find a way to implement it with the new APIs. No more answers from SVBONY.

- improvements :
* no more hard coded stuff
* all camera settings are available
* better live view
* support for arm v6, v7 and v8 (virtually. Only tested on amd64 and x86 yet. All my PI boards are actually engaged in my "power grid" monitoring system )

But as you can see, the driver may be used as is.

Just let me test it on raspberry, and I will send a pull request.

Best regards !

Blaise

PS : I will look at the CircleCI issues as soon as possible.

Blaise,

Thank you. My setup is a stock SkyWatcher 250P Goto Dobsonian. I have a home-built waveshare HAT focuser and use the indi_skywatcherAltAzMount driver for the GOTO. Nothing special...lots of short exposure subs, stacking with Siril and finish in GIMP.

I will test with Pi3 and Pi4 this week.

I hope your wife recovers rapidly and wish you good luck and patience with your new-found avocation as a daycare venue.

*JC*