OACapture will not control certain cameras on RPI version

[JamesF]

6 minutes ago, PlankWithANailIn said:

Altair cameras are rebranded Touptek so I don't think differentiating them using "genuine" is 100% accurate.

Indeed they are.  However some (but not necessarily all) of the vendors of cameras manufactured by Touptek, and there are quite a few even just in the field of astronomy, use different USB vendor and product IDs.  Actually it is even worse than that, as some use their own IDs for some cameras and Touptek's for others which can result in some surprising behaviour.

For instance, at least one of the Altair-branded cameras is no longer supported by the Altair SDK (it used to be in older versions), but is recognised by the current SDKs provided by Touptek for several other brands and works perfectly when used that way, though the SDK will tell you it's a completely different camera.  It's possible that the older Altair SDK used to recognise and work with some Opticstar-branded cameras, too.  On my development system where I usually have all the SDKs installed at the same time, at least one camera I have is recognised as four different brands (with a different camera name in each case).

It doesn't make for an easy time debugging problems...

James

[dannybgoode]

@JamesF I have run lsusb and screenshot attached showing the result. I have also made the change you suggested to the 99-altaircam.rules file which is how it shows on my installation of Astroberry. Again screenshot below of the change I made - bottom line is the one I added.

Full power off and reboot of the Pi and reconnected the camera and still nothing showing up in OACapture (v1.9.0). The Camera settings tab is just greyed out.

A I say Linux is not my strong point so if I've done something stupid do let me know

Also apologies for the literal screenshots. New keyboard and can't find the actual screenshot key

[JamesF]

I'm at a loss to explain this for the moment, I have to admit.

Do you know if it works ok with Kstars/Ekos?  (Apologies if I've missed that information somewhere already.)

James

[dannybgoode]

9 hours ago, JamesF said:

I'm at a loss to explain this for the moment, I have to admit.

Do you know if it works ok with Kstars/Ekos?  (Apologies if I've missed that information somewhere already.)

James

Hi James

Yes it works fine with EKOS and PHD2. I use it as my solving and guide cam.

OACapture doesn't pick up and cameras at all. Doesn't pick up my main SX cam either and the camera option in settings is greyed out.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by dannybgoode

[Stuart1971]

I started this thread on December 29th last year, and I still can’t use my QHY5 or an Altair Astro camera with OAcapture on my raspberry PI...so I assume this is not going to happen anytime soon... ☹️

[JamesF]

18 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

I started this thread on December 29th last year, and I still can’t use my QHY5 or an Altair Astro camera with OAcapture on my raspberry PI...so I assume this is not going to happen anytime soon... ☹️

Can you respond with the information I asked for on 5th Jan?

Sometimes these things just do take time.  I get no assistance from Altair with this project, so unless I actually have the camera in question it can just be a case of waiting until someone happens to bring to light some critical piece of evidence that points to the cause.

James

[Stuart1971]

On 05/01/2021 at 01:04, JamesF said:

I've just tried an Altair camera (GPCAM AR130C) and another camera which is also made by Touptek and is basically the same as the GPCAM AR130C, to the point where the Altair SDK recognises it as such.

On my (Intel) development machine oacapture sees both cameras.  When I tested on the RPi running Astroberry it didn't see the genuine Altair camera, but recognised the other.  This is a confusing result if the Altair camera works under INDI because both are using the same SDK library to find the cameras.

I'll rebuild oacapture from source on the Astroberry machine (assuming that's practical) and see what I can find out.

James

What info from this date...?? There is nothing asked for...!! 🤔

Edited March 24, 2021 by Stuart1971

[JamesF]

8 hours ago, Stuart1971 said:

What info from this date...?? There is nothing asked for...!! 🤔

Sorry, this one:

On 05/01/2021 at 20:37, JamesF said:

Well, I'm at a loss to explain what's going on with the Altair camera at the moment.  When oacapture calls the Altair SDK to find out how many cameras are connected, it returns none.  That's the same way that INDI finds out if there are cameras connected, so I can't see how it can work in one and not the other.  I think I'm going to have to sit on this one for a while to see if anything helpful occurs to me.

It might be helpful if you could paste the output of the following two commands (run from a terminal window) on the RPi:

dpkg-query -l libaltaircam

lsusb

(The latter with the camera plugged in.)

James

Apologies if I wasn't clear.  Covid jab day today and I was a bit distracted trying to plan for things in case I don't feel great.

James

[dannybgoode]

3 hours ago, JamesF said:

Sorry, this one:

Apologies if I wasn't clear.  Covid jab day today and I was a bit distracted trying to plan for things in case I don't feel great.

James

Apologies - ignore me... 

Edited March 24, 2021 by dannybgoode

[JamesF]

1 minute ago, dannybgoode said:

Apologies - ignore me... 

Who said that?

James

[JamesF]

Just had another thought for those who still have Altair cameras that aren't working...

Could you run oacapture from the command line and paste any output it gives in the terminal window, please?

James

[dannybgoode]

23 hours ago, JamesF said:

Just had another thought for those who still have Altair cameras that aren't working...

Could you run oacapture from the command line and paste any output it gives in the terminal window, please?

James

More than happy to try.  How do I do that though?

[JamesF]

7 minutes ago, dannybgoode said:

How do I do that though?

Just open a terminal window, type "oacapture" and press return.  Then proceed as normal when the application starts.  If you can screenshot whatever appears in the terminal window, that would be great.

James

[dannybgoode]

5 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Just open a terminal window, type "oacapture" and press return.  Then proceed as normal when the application starts.  If you can screenshot whatever appears in the terminal window, that would be great.

James

Does this help?

[JamesF]

Well, it's the right thing to do, but there's not as much output as I was hoping for.  That may however be a clue in itself, so I'll check a few things out here.

James

[Stuart1971]

18 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Well, it's the right thing to do, but there's not as much output as I was hoping for.  That may however be a clue in itself, so I'll check a few things out here.

James

Would “sudo oacapture” show more..?.

[JamesF]

2 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

Would “sudo oacapture” show more..?.

It shouldn't (he says

It might be interesting to try, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't potentially mess up the saved configuration for oacapture, so probably isn't a good idea unless you'd be comfortable fixing that if it did.

James

[dannybgoode]

2 minutes ago, JamesF said:

It shouldn't (he says

It might be interesting to try, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't potentially mess up the saved configuration for oacapture, so probably isn't a good idea unless you'd be comfortable fixing that if it did.

James

What's the worst that could happen

 

 

[JamesF]

It doesn't say anything more that is helpful then.  Oh well.

James

[JamesF]

I'm thinking at this point that one of the things I need to add for a future release, preferably as soon as possible, is some fairly verbose logging of what is going on internally.

James

[Stuart1971]

9 minutes ago, JamesF said:

It shouldn't (he says

It might be interesting to try, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't potentially mess up the saved configuration for oacapture, so probably isn't a good idea unless you'd be comfortable fixing that if it did.

James

Why would using Sudo potentially mess anything up, I use it all the time with all my commands, as if I don’t, somethings things won’t work.. am I missing something...?

[JamesF]

Just now, Stuart1971 said:

Why would using Sudo potentially mess anything up, I use it all the time with all my commands, as if I don’t, somethings things won’t work.. am I missing something...?

My concern is that I can't be sure where the Qt toolkit would decide to save all the program settings when run via sudo, nor exactly how it would do that.  There may be a risk that it would overwrite the normal user's settings leaving them owned by root, which would probably then mess things up when oacapture was run normally.

I don't know it would happen.  Unfortunately neither do I know that it definitely wouldn't as I've had similar things happen once or twice with other applications.  I'd have to try it and see.  I've now found the SD card with my Astroberry installation again, so I can look at testing some more things out based on today's findings.

James

[JamesF]

Well, I'm at a bit of a loss to explain this now...

The Altair cameras I can test against the latest Astroberry generally work.  The exception is one that has had support dropped from the Altair SDK and therefore won't work anywhere (though as previously mentioned I have hacked support for it, in a fairly ugly way).

My code doesn't have a clue what camera is actually connected -- it just asks the Altair SDK for frame size, what controls are available and so on -- so if it works for one then in theory it ought to work for all, but perhaps I have subconsciously made some assumption that just isn't true for these particular cameras.  Or perhaps there's some issue in the SDK that means they won't work in streaming mode (which is different from how INDI uses them as far as I recall), but I struggle to believe that.  Unfortunately there's no way for me to work on that directly without access to the specific camera in question.  If anyone can do that for me then that's great, though it's probably only really practical if you're really comfortable with Linux.  Otherwise I'll have to look at what logging I can add to the code to help debug this problem in the next release.

James

[dannybgoode]

On 30/03/2021 at 11:26, JamesF said:

Well, I'm at a bit of a loss to explain this now...

The Altair cameras I can test against the latest Astroberry generally work.  The exception is one that has had support dropped from the Altair SDK and therefore won't work anywhere (though as previously mentioned I have hacked support for it, in a fairly ugly way).

My code doesn't have a clue what camera is actually connected -- it just asks the Altair SDK for frame size, what controls are available and so on -- so if it works for one then in theory it ought to work for all, but perhaps I have subconsciously made some assumption that just isn't true for these particular cameras.  Or perhaps there's some issue in the SDK that means they won't work in streaming mode (which is different from how INDI uses them as far as I recall), but I struggle to believe that.  Unfortunately there's no way for me to work on that directly without access to the specific camera in question.  If anyone can do that for me then that's great, though it's probably only really practical if you're really comfortable with Linux.  Otherwise I'll have to look at what logging I can add to the code to help debug this problem in the next release.

James

How comfortable is comfortable?  I am not an expert in Linux but am pretty comfortable, with guidance at least, doing most things on most OS's via command lines or anything else and would be happy to help if at all I can.  Of course if I would be more of a hinderance I quite understand

Given I am currently confined to quarters anyway I have time on my hands... 

Edited April 1, 2021 by dannybgoode

[JamesF]

7 hours ago, dannybgoode said:

How comfortable is comfortable?  I am not an expert in Linux but am pretty comfortable, with guidance at least, doing most things on most OS's via command lines or anything else and would be happy to help if at all I can.  Of course if I would be more of a hinderance I quite understand

Given I am currently confined to quarters anyway I have time on my hands... 

Well, I guess briefly the ideal would be to install a copy of the OS on a different SD card (so whatever I mess about with can't break anything for you and can just be ditched afterwards) and boot the RPi from that with the camera connected and then make whatever arrangements are necessary for me to be able to connect to the RPi using ssh and have root access.  I'd then be able to install whatever packages are required, download the source code and build a version to debug.  For most people that's probably asking quite a lot though and in any case very careful consideration should definitely be required before allowing someone you don't really know to have access to systems on your home network.

James