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Altair camera on raspberry pi indi


cjdawson

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Hey all.

I’m in the process of setting up a Raspberry PI to run PHD2 with KStars/EKos withi two Altair cameras.   So far I think we have everything installed, but can’t seem to get indi working with either KSTARS or PHD2.    I’m pretty sure that something isn’t installed yet.    The PI is running on Raspbian, so the ubuntu install instructions doesn’t work.  Can anyone point me in the right direction to be able to get this setup working please?

 

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I don't believe Altair cameras are supported on the RPi.  I'm sure I've asked Altair, possibly more than once, and been told there's no ARM/RPi SDK available.  Which is kind of odd when you consider that ARM SDKs are available for other cameras from the Touptek stable and the core code is probably very similar for them all.

That aside, the fastest solution in terms of getting Kstars etc. working might be to install Astroberry rather than Raspbian.  If that isn't going to be possible then it may get more complicated.

James

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Astroberry is based on Ubuntu, and there are altair drivers for indi that work with ubuntu.   I'd prefer to see if I can get this working with Raspbian though.    This is the thing that I like least about linux, too many distributions each with their own quirks and that makes software hard to install.

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Perhaps I am wrong then.  Maybe Altair have finally released drivers for ARM.  That would be good news.  I shall have another look.

What errors are you getting when you try to use it?  More information would definitely help to get some idea of where things are going wrong.

James

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Just now, cjdawson said:

I'm unable to connect to the altair cameras via Indi.  However, oacapture does work

Blimey.  How did I manage to make that work? :D  Clearly it has been far too long a day.

Does indi fail to connect when you start indi_altair_ccd (or whatever it is called) or are you attempting to start it from Kstars/Ekos?  What error messages do you see?

(I'm just about to hit the sack now, but I'll have a look again in the morning.)

James

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I think the main problem is that I'm a bit of a noob to indi and may not have started the local indi server part properly.

 

As for installing oacapture, I installed it after installing indi.  it works out of the box on rasbian buster.

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I think I just cracked it.   Seems that there's a program called indi starter that you can get from the CDC people, once installed, that gives me a gui to tell it what drivers to use.   I think that will give some progress :D

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Just to mention that Astroberry 2.0 uses Raspbian (Buster) rather than Ubuntu, and that an alternative installation method uses the AstroPi3 script. I use this with  ZWO camera and Canon DSLRs. If Altair Astro camera drivers are available they should get installed when this script is run.

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@Gina thought of you when I was putting thinking about posting this, and knew that you use ZWO cameras, just like I do.    The Altair cameras are a friends and I'm helping him get a PI4 up and running.

 

@Avocette I tried the AstroPI script, it installed alot of stuff, but in the process wrecked a load of settings that I'd already made.   That said, last after making the post, I did try running some of the bits from the Astroberry setup, which as you said now uses buster, and it looks like it's installed everything.

 

I just need to figure out how to connect to cameras via indi.    I'm going to play with that today using one of my ZWO cameras, but I want to connect via indi and not direct to the camera. (so that I can mimic the altair camera setup)

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My apologies.  I probably confused myself on this (very long day yesterday -- started work at 9am and didn't finish until gone midnight).  At one point there were RPi drivers available.  Those would appear to be what is in INDI.  They're over a year old now and may be unreliable, particularly with newer cameras.  They probably also don't support older Altair cameras such as the original GPCAM models (MT9M034?) as support was removed for those.  I think, though I am not sure, that cameras such as the Hypercam 174 require a later version of the drivers.  On MacOS and 64-bit Intel I am using a version from mid August 2019 which does not appear to be in INDI yet.

Towards the end of October I asked Altair:

"There were new releases of AltairCapture for Linux and MacOS a month or so back, using libaltaircam version 39.15364.20190819, but just on Intel platforms.  Are there versions of that same library available for ARM-based Linux systems?"

The response (in mid-November) was:

"Hi there, at this time we have nothing available which is stable/reliable."

There's been no release since that I'm aware of.

So I guess it might work or it might not :(  If people already running Astroberry can use the same cameras as you have successfully then it looks good.  Otherwise you probably just have to try it and see what happens.  It may be worth adding your voice to the few who have expressed an interest in up-to-date drivers for the RPi to Altair.  I imagine the more who do the more likely they are to do something about it.

James

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12 hours ago, cjdawson said:

Astroberry is based on Ubuntu, and there are altair drivers for indi that work with ubuntu.   I'd prefer to see if I can get this working with Raspbian though.    This is the thing that I like least about linux, too many distributions each with their own quirks and that makes software hard to install.

No its not Astroberry V2 is based on Raspian Buster 🙂

Ignore me someone had already stated that fact :-

Edited by stash_old
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9 hours ago, cjdawson said:

I think I just cracked it.   Seems that there's a program called indi starter that you can get from the CDC people, once installed, that gives me a gui to tell it what drivers to use.   I think that will give some progress :D

Just use Indi Web GUI - especially with Astroberry(but comes with all versions of Indi) - it controls Indiserver and you can create profiles for what drivers you want starting. It also has the ability to restart individual drivers - so you dont have to restart all the drivers - a very useful point.

Plus its very simple to use.

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1 hour ago, stash_old said:

Just use Indi Web GUI - especially with Astroberry(but comes with all versions of Indi) - it controls Indiserver and you can create profiles for what drivers you want starting. It also has the ability to restart individual drivers - so you dont have to restart all the drivers - a very useful point.

Plus its very simple to use.

ooo, that's interesting.   I'm going to take a look at that when I have time.  Especially if it autostarts the server on boot.  Might be easier than the indiserver program that I already tried.

 

 

As for Astroberry.   I thought it was based on ubuntu, but that is obviously wrong.  That will explain why it was easy to install some of the software direct from the astroberry repos.  (saved me a lot of time and hassle)

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To be honest just download the astroberry v2 image - may save you a lot of hassle.  Radek monitors SGL quite often - he created Astroberry v1 and v2. V2 runs on ALL RPI even 4 using BUSTER

And yes it will auto start, and auto connect devices (must be online FIRST) plus as I said restart individual drivers when problems - doesn't always sor the problem but better than having to restart INDISERVER

See attached screen print with Altair indriver set up - does not mean it will work - I dont have a altair camera 🙂  This was using Chrome on the RPI but it could have been any browser on any box (note maybe some problems with IE)

The only CON (Pro and Con) is that you cant change to nightly (experimental)  repository but main repository for Asroberry V2 is update quite regularly - Even has some obscure software called Oacapture LOL 🙂  Updates are done as per Ubuntu. Plus hopefully when the RPI4 B+ comes out in 4 weeks time you will be able to use it out of the box (maybe) not wait for Ubuntu etc to catch up - which they haven't still really (server version only) plus a messy desktop install.

P.S. If you cant get your Altair to work - you could try using CCDCIEL it can run on Windows(macos or Linux) talk to Indi (like Ekos) AND connect to Ascom camera's at the same time which I presume Altair camera's have ????  Unfortunately you will have to have a cable to your Windows/Macos PC from the Altair device. 

 

 

altair.png

Edited by stash_old
My keyboard T doesn't always work :-)
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It won't save me any hassle at all, as for my needs I want to run software and configurations that are not part of AstroBerry.   There are things that are not standard at all so I really do not want to start from anything other than the complete official raspbian image.  (I have reasons, and don't want to elaborate)   besides, I think I already solved the problem just before  I went to bed last night and anything else now will be a setback.

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@RadekK I'm glad that Astroberry runs on Raspbian buster.  However there are somethings that I'm doing a different way.  The main difference so far is...

 

  • Astroberry Wireless Hotspot allowing to access the system directly i.e. without external wireless network eg. in the field

 

Rather than using the hotspot that you provide, I'm using a different project called RaspAP.   This allows the PI to be a hotspot whilst connecting to a network as a client over wifi at the same time!   This makes it more flexible when as I don't need to choose whether to be a hotspot, or have it connect to a network, it can do both at the same time.

 

I'm also using the image for other non-astro related stuff, so need to have full control over the install.

 

Astroberry is a great starting point for those who don't have specialist needs, in fact I'd still recommend that people look at it as the first port of call to see if it does everything they need, it most likely does.... and more.   (Just I'm very very picky)

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I use Astroberry as the starting point for my astro projects.  Astroberry Focuser works well with my stepper driven focusers and I modify Astroberry Board for controlling things like dew heaters.  I shall also be using it for my observatory ROR roof control.

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