NickK

I've just had confirmation that the adaptor is back from anodisation and ready for delivery - should have this sometime next week :)

Hi Gustavo - I've compiled the modern drivers and I'm just working on the legacy. The problem supporting 10.6 on mac is that you need an old C2D machine todo it - I have the mini which is working nicely as I boot into 10.6 but it means I have to be sat infront of the mini todo it rather than the more convenient laptop! Although I won't be creating the Example Application on 10.6, the drivers will be tested and then released. Craig has expressed a great interest so I'm expecting these to be picked up quickly.

OK I have the modern drivers compiled for 10.6 with 32/64bit. I forgotten how.. err nethandertal.. um bad the development tools where back then. Just trying to get the legacy drivers compiled.. I've decided NOT to attempt to port the Example App. I really am not keen to really reinvent the wheel for 10.6. Instead I'll hand over the 10.6 drivers to someone that is currently working with 10.6 .. someone you all know and love - Craig Stark.

Some good fixes and enhancements.

Right I think this is working :D as the 4000 skeleton I have is happily multiple taking exposures :) So thats.. making things ready for the beta release :D

Going to be testing today :) The 3xx,4xx and titan are fine.. the 4000/11000 driver has a issue that I'm actively chasing too.

So .. I have finished the code changes, however I want a couple of evenings in front of the cameras to perform a full set of tests then I'll release the Beta 2 :) Sorry for the delay!

Well, hot on the release of the beta one set - I'll be releasing beta 2 with the following (shortly): Changes/Fixes Bugfix: Titan - image now post-processes correctly. Bugfix: All cameras - timing bug introduced with the timing abort was taking the exposure duration as microseconds not milliseconds now fixed. Feature: Titan auto black-level working (enable using driver with example app switch for your playing pleasure!) Enhancement: legacy connect and disconnect is now threaded. Feature: Guide Port support - including a virtual play pad in the example application. Additional tidying and optimisation. I'll also have the subsample and precharge code present in the drivers, so these may make it into the B2.. if not B3 along with the overlapped exposure+download to speed up repeated frame capture.

Just a simulation at the moment, however attached is a non-cooled integration so I can see what can be done with fast video-like integration. 27x30 second exposures with registration, no guiding, no polar alignment and no cooling (for extra noise!) and sigma integration.. so I picked a nondescript, but darkish part of the sky (straight up to minimise light polution. It bodes well with 9Boo being the brightest and some nice mag 13-15 in there running at 670mm f/6.38.. binnign 2x2 would make for even easier finding (faster download and brighter target).

Hi Oz - yes, these are OSX drivers for ATIK cameras. I've spent one evening doing DSO and imaging the end of the garden in HA as dog fooding - found another bug that I've created.

Well I've been doing some dogfooding.. this time for image processing live in realtime using the titan :D However it appears I have found slightly minor programmer issue.. hands up who can tell me seconds, milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds.. in short the beta 1 drivers have a little issue with converting between these after the abort changes I made.. hence the odd timing behaviour. This is fixed (and the programmer supplied with beer for his troubles). Expect an update for beta shortly..

Interesting .. PI runs JS for the glue, however the portions that do each stage are C/C++ etc. The main things are that people are looking for in AP: * Explore * Plane * Capture (Execute) * Process * Publish Now there's more people also interested in the non-beauty element which involves odd image processing so make it that one stage can feed into the next with a user's own processor between them. Good luck, that's a considerable amount of work - it may be better to look at seeing if PI libraries could be used for open source..

Well.. at least to support ye-olde 3.3 fully! (3.3 is basically like DX11.. the latest is something like 4.2..) - supposedly it runs 3.2 but I'm not convinced.. I can see the logic of avoiding 4.x as it's too new and a mess... Which basically means that the only thing buying a higher end graphic GPU in an apple is that it goes faster by clock speed and number of pipelines.. nothing about using the (now standard) features available - a PC and linux have more advanced graphics sub-systems! I'm having to use OpenCL to render 3D volume visualisations rather than OpenGL! Oh.. yes.. it is astronomy related ;)

If you've missed it.. Now I'm going to get myself a beer.

One more bug fix then the repeat the auto tests for the final time ... then release :)

Features (where camera supports) Image exposure Image Binning (up to 3 times in X&Y - this is an artificial limit imposed to shorten automated testing time) Image sub-framing Image preview Setpoint Cooling EFW2 Number of Filters EFW2 Filter selection Camera & Filterwheel Hotplug connect and disconnect Abort exposure time Lots of bug fixes, some improvements too - things such as being able to set the capture location by simply dragging the directory on it.. I should have time over the next few days to finalise the remaining outstanding bits. Experimental Alpha Release (internal) - v0.04 (xx Apr 2013) Changes/Fixes Internal bug fixes and continued restructuring - both for the current and legacy drivers. Added new 490ex series USB codes to current driver Camera and Filterwheel disconnection via thrown ATIKDeviceDisconnectedException Abort exposure/download now works Major improvement for initialisation coping with flushing etc Camera unique identities based on serial numbers etc or bus location USB codes correction - this should pick up 400 series and 16/16C/16HR/16HRC/16ICS series correctly Testing at SGL8: 16HR, 460ex OSC, 314L+ as well as at Olly’s: 11000M, 320E Sorting out of the header files... it’s a little easier - everything should work with one include per driver. Friendly comments in the header files.. documentation! Legacy driver - fixed for exposures less than 1 second Example application - Unlikely to have “unknown” now Example application - File Capture doesn’t show every image but every 10th image Example application - image save location Example application - removed thread race condition (Cocoa binding causing a bypass of my queue..whoops!) ​So these will have the testing done at SGL8 too :)

Decided to move up abort and disconnect which was originally planned for beta.. again something windows seems to make easy but OSX/linux doesn't. Currently adding more for disconnect..

So I've been quiet - lots of things happening in the real world.. so rather than drop a beta, I've been focusing on a few bug fixes and enhancements as mentioned in my previous blog. One of the outstanding things that has been hanging around is solving the camera start up when something bad has happened - in this case when you pull the cable and the restart the application. Due to the difference in the way windows and OSX work at a low level this caused an the OSX driver to hang if a download was interrupted by an unplug until the camera was restarted. OSX doesn't flush USB or return data if a USB read times out.. now if you don't now how much you need to flush then reading till you timeout would be a very useful thing - Go Apple.. This mornings fun has now resolved this scenario for the OSX drivers :D which is very very very important for remote installs and normal human beings that just want to get on and image :D Like me at SGL7.. as kev saw this bug at close hand with the titan. During this exercise I've located and fixed a few bugs - both in the driver and in the example application (one is a race condition that caused it to hang/crash). So I'm going to release an Alpha4 with fixes for this and the other fixes for issues in the Alpha3 drivers.. shortly..

Many thanks to those that helped with testing the OSX ATIK drivers at SGL8! Added Legacy camera: 16HR Added Modern cameras: 460ex OSC, 314L More dogfooding with the Titan with whitelight solar too!

Added the PC app to the thread: Basically it's a FTDI demo application :D

For the goods: I've been squirrelling away on the commute to bring the test application up to a respectable level. I feel that it's basically usable in order to allow people to test the drivers by simply trying it! Although I've tried the drivers on all the main forms of camera, you always get differences appearing in real life when people attempt to use software and hardware with their own computers. So this will allow people to have some fun whilst my attention, rather like the eye of sauron, moves back towards AOSX and integrating this for the beta series of releases. It's been interesting experience, at one point I had two 11000 monos, 320E, 383L, Titan, 16IC, EFW2 and 4000 carcass on the table.. Anyway.. for now - back to reality!