oacapture 1.0.0

[Davey-T]

Hi James, only just got round to trying the latest version today and notice max' available frame rate using the Skyris 274M has dropped from 20 to 15 and if I increase the exposure time it drops to 1fps.

Also 16bit button is greyed out ?

All running on USB3

MBP late 2012, I updated to El Capitan before I tried the latest oaCapture so don't know if that's the problem as never tried it with Yosemite.

Everything seems slower in El C' takes ages to boot up now.

Thanks,

Dave

[Gina]

32 minutes ago, D4N said:

Hi James,

 

I have built oacapture-1.0.0 in Ubuntu mate on my pi3 and it runs fine but when I connect to my asi178mc the application stops responding.

The OS still responds fine and CPU usage is around 40%.  I have to either force quite or xkill to close oacapture.

Any ideas on what might be wrong?

I'll try with Raspian and the same camera when I get a chance.

I'll be interested too as I plan to run oaCapture on RPi with Raspbian also.

 

[D4N]

Ok I have fired up my Pi2 which has Raspbian and installed oacapture-1.0.0-raspbian on it but when I try to connect my asi178mc I get the error 'Unable to connect camera'.  At least it doesn't lock up the app though.

 

This camera does connect on my MacBook Pro using oacapture-1.0.0.

[D4N]

Some more fault finding;

 

I have tried both my Pi2 (running Raspian) and my Pi3 (running Ubuntu mate) with both my asi120mm and my asi178mc.

I have tried connecting the cameras directly (Pi3 seems to be able to handle this with a 2.4A supply), via a powered hub and via a dual cable with the power coming from a separate supply.

I have not been able to get them to work in any configuration.

[Gina]

Oh dear   Looks like we need James on this...

[D4N]

Well I'm getting somewhere now, I have the 120mm working on the Pi3 now.  I can't say for sure what got it working but I adjusted a load of settings and now it works.

Next up is the 178mc as the 120mm is really just a guide cam , I only connected it for testing.

[D4N]

Which is now working.

I think it had something to do with either the exposure length or image, I selected ROI and adjusted the exposure just before they both started working.

Well that all took a lot of fiddling to get going, guess I'll back up the SD card now in case I mess it up!

[Gina]

Could you explain the sequence of operations needed to install oaCapture on the RPi 3, please?   Plus what was needed to get the ASI178MM working.  This is what I want to do for my all sky cam.

[D4N]

It depends on what OS you will use Gina.  I'm fed up with Raspbian so went for Ubuntu mate on mine but this makes the install a lot trickier.

Raspbian is pretty easy though just download the package and do 'sudo ./install-binaries.sh

I already had version 0.5.0 on my Pi2 so I can't remember what dependencies are required for it, I think it mentions a few in the read me file though.

The application does need quite a high resolution, 1024x768 is not enough as the save dialogue will disappear off the edge of the screen.  I've got mine on 2048x1536 to match my iPad so this gives plenty of space.

As for getting the 178 camera working I am not 100% sure what the problem was, I just hope it stays working

It is certainly worth noting that the Pi3 seems to be able to power this camera provided that it has a good power supply itself.  If you have anything else in the USB ports though it probably won't manage it.

[Gina]

Thank you   I am using Raspbian.  For display I plan to use WiFi from my main desktop with a 1920x1080 display.  Hope that would be enough.  I have yet to sort out WiFi.  I currently use TeamViewer with the laptop but don't know it this would be best for the RPi.

[D4N]

I am using nomachine to control it remotely from my iPad.

VNC works too but I find nomachine updates faster and has a better touch interface.

Getting the PI on the home network is easy, getting it to create its own network so you can use it anywhere is a bit more involved.

[JamesF]

Can I just check that you have added yourself to the "users" group if you aren't already in it? If you do so you'll need to log out and log in again for the change to take effect.

James

[JamesF]

3 hours ago, D4N said:

The application does need quite a high resolution, 1024x768 is not enough as the save dialogue will disappear off the edge of the screen.  I've got mine on 2048x1536 to match my iPad so this gives plenty of space.

In this version I've removed the minimum screen size as a number of people had reported it being a pain on small displays.  If necessary you can split the controls into a separate window too, which may help further.

James

[JamesF]

10 hours ago, D4N said:

Hi James,

 

I have built oacapture-1.0.0 in Ubuntu mate on my pi3 and it runs fine but when I connect to my asi178mc the application stops responding.

The OS still responds fine and CPU usage is around 40%.  I have to either force quite or xkill to close oacapture.

Any ideas on what might be wrong?

I'll try with Raspian and the same camera when I get a chance.

I don't have an ASI178MC, but I'll try my ZWO cameras on the RPi3 running Raspian this weekend.

James

[JamesF]

10 hours ago, Davey-T said:

Hi James, only just got round to trying the latest version today and notice max' available frame rate using the Skyris 274M has dropped from 20 to 15 and if I increase the exposure time it drops to 1fps.

Also 16bit button is greyed out ?

All running on USB3

MBP late 2012, I updated to El Capitan before I tried the latest oaCapture so don't know if that's the problem as never tried it with Yosemite.

Everything seems slower in El C' takes ages to boot up now.

Thanks,

Dave

I'm sure I tested this camera on my 2013 MBP running El Capitan, but I'll give it another try.

James

[D4N]

Hi James,

 

Yep I am in users group.

Im still not sure what I did to get it working on my Pi3, it is not working on my Pi2 (0.5.0 did work on my Pi2).  I'll try again when I have had some sleep I think.

 

Ah I didn't know you could adjust the display like that.

 

Now I am fighting with the frame rates, sometimes it seems to ignore exposure time instructions.  I'm not sure why but it does this on OSX as well.  It's cloudy though so a good time to mess around with this stuff

[Lightpath]

Hello everyone-

 

I'm trying to get oacapture working on my pi-  I appear to be missing some libraries though:

 

oacapture: error while loading shared libraries: libcfitsio.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

 

The common answer among the answers to this problem I found on the net was to simlink other libraries I don't have installed.    Any thoughts as to what distro I need to install.

 

Thanks!

 

Mark.

[JamesF]

I'd have thought this would fix your problem:

$ sudo apt-get install libcfitsio3

James

[GuLinux]

Hi @JamesF, may I ask you why all these bundled libraries? Particularly libusb, is it a patched version, or just a more updated one?

Thanks

Marco

[JamesF]

libusb comes from the development stream for that project.  There's no release yet for fixes that are required, though it looks like we're getting close now.

libdc1394 is a later version than appears common on most distributions.

libuvc is patched and doesn't appear to be easily available in a packaged format for users to install either.

libhidapi just doesn't seem to be available in a packaged format anywhere.

ffmpeg requires at least a specific version, but that project is one that I really struggle to get my head around.  There appear to be so many different releases in the wild.

Then there are the binary blobs for supporting various cameras that aren't available as packages either.

James

[GuLinux]

You use ffmpeg to save to specific video formats I guess..

If that's the case, I wouldn't bang my head too much around that.

As a planetary imager, I want to use SER for saving my records whenever possible, since it's lossless and it's widely supported by the major stacking softwares.

Sure, it takes a huge amount of space, but after processing, I just use a heavy compression algorithm (bzip2, xz) and it's very effective.

In my own capture application, I also offer different video formats, but through OpenCV video recording APIs, without directly using ffmpeg.

 

Anyway, back to libusb, what are the specific fixes you are referring to? Speed issues?

I'm having a slight slowdown, and ZWO developers tells me it might be libusb fault, so I'm investigating a bit...

Thanks

Marco

 

 

[JamesF]

There are quite a lot of fixes in libusb, though some of the most recent ones (over the last few months) that I care about are OSX-specific.  However, there hasn't been a full release for a year (the one used in Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 18) and I think the version used in Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint 17 is at least three years old.

It shouldn't be hard to re-link oacapture against the system version of libusb though if you want to try it.  I think you could probably just edit the command that links the final executable to use "-lusb" instead of the path to the static library.

James

[D4N]

Hi James,

 

I am having trouble with setting exposure times.  I was having this problem in OSX and Linux but after updating my MBP to El-Capitan (which involved a complete wipe and then recover from time machine so wasn't much fun) it seems to be working fine in OSX.

 

The problem seems to be that when I try to go over 999ms exposure time it starts dropping frames a lot.

If I take a sequence of 3 x 999ms frames it will take 3 seconds, if I take a sequence of 3 x 1000ms frames it takes 42 seconds. A sequence of 3 x 2000ms frames takes about two minutes.

This is the report from recording 3 x 1000ms frames.

oaCapture 1.0.0

Camera: ZWO ASI178MC
Time: 1970-02-06 00:04:05
Timezone: CET (+0100)
Profile: default
Target: Other
Brightness: 0
Blue Balance: 0
Red Balance: 0
Gamma: 0
Auto Gain: off
Gain: 255
Horizontal Flip: off
Vertical Flip: off
Auto Exposure: off
1000
High Speed: off
Colour Mode: not recorded
USB Traffic: 50
Bit Depth: 24
Auto Red Balance: off
Auto Blue Balance: off
Binning: 1x1
Auto USB Traffic: off
Temp (C): 31.1
Dropped Frames: 161
Image size: 1280x960
Filter: None
First frame: 00:04:05.167
Middle: 03:33:02.519
Last frame: 00:04:47.168
Duration (seconds): 42.001
Frames captured: 3
Frames per second (average): 0
Recording type: TIFF
Limit (frames) : 3

This was with tiff files, the same happens with .avi and it happens regardless of whether I have the frame/time limit turned on or not.

 

This is running on my Pi3 with Ubuntu Mate 16.04.

Do you have any idea what might be going wrong here?

[Gina]

Could someone please tell me the procedure for installing oacapture in Linux?  In particular Raspbian or Ubuntu.  I should know from my previous Linux experience but I forget.

[JamesF]

Are you installing from your own build, or from a binary distribution?

James