Camera Drivers For Windows 10
Sinikka Curz
If the operating system does not detect the camera, you must first make sure that the camera drivers are installed. In addition, do not forget that manufacturers of webcams strongly recommend installing the latest drivers. If you do not have the CD and installation files for your webcam, first of all, try to find them on the manufacturer's official website. If you could not find them there, do not hesitate to download free webcam drivers from our website.
I have macbook M1 and a ZWO camera (actually 2, ASI385MC and ASI294MC). I am trying to use Sharpcap on the mac. Since Sharpcap is Windows only software, I got Parallels, windows 11 (for the M1, it needs to be Windows 11 Insider Preview), installed Sharpcap in Windows and the Windows ZWO drivers for my camera.
The problem I am getting is that the ZWO driver doesn't seem to be working properly with Windows 11/Parallels. Parallels properly detect my camera, but even after installing the ZWO driver on Windows (it installs properly with no reported errors), neither Sharpcap, nor ZWO ASIStudio can detect the camera...
I am also interested in this and will be following this thread as I intent to move to Apple silicon soon but if it impacts the Window 11 VM and my ASI2600MC, I'd like to wait until something is in place before doing so.
But knowing that macs are moving to ARM and dropping intel, I am would think that ZWO is going to move into supporting windows ARM drivers. Surprisingly on mac (not in parallels), ASIStudio is able to connect to my ASI294MC without any issues so ZWO already has ARM code to talk to their camera... That code hasn't been included in their windows drivers but I suspect (hope?) it might come soon.
I really with there was a way for asistudio (running on the macos side) to just act as a bridge and feed its output directly into sharpcap (running on the parallels/windows side). There are a lot of useful features exposed by sharpcap and not found on asistudio (polar align, focus helper, better controls when stacking, etc...). I am using my ASI cameras for EAA and sharpcap is just too good of a tool there...
Obs30 : from what @w7ay implies, ASIStudio on the Mac runs via the Rosetta2 emulation (the 'invisible' emulator by apple which allows you to run x86-compiled apps on the arm arch). So technically ZWO didn't have to change anything in ASIStudio on the Mac for it work on M1.
Now with Parallels and Windows, things are different. We had to download a special version of windows compiled for M1. So there is no more transparent emulation at this point. Somebody from ZWO has to explicitly compile and distribute the driver for M1... Hoping that this happens soon...
IkeCam : well, unfortunately no, not if you are running windows 11 on a M1 Mac. Apple is slowly switching all their computers to use their new M1 chip (with is based on the ARM architecture) vs the old intel chip (based on the x86/x86-64 architecture). And the current windows drivers only seem to work on the x68 arch
The ASIAIR, however, is running on LINUX on an ARM architecture (RPi4, ARM A72, Broadcom BCM2712) and they offer SDKs for both iOS and Android, both ARM architectures. So this should be easy for them to offer native drivers for the M1. Probably just a matter of time.
The original Rosetta was released to bridge the gap at the time Apple switched from the Motorola/IBM processors (the Apple-IBM-Motorola, or AIM consortium) to the Intel processors. It first appeared in 2006, and Apple only finally stop supporting Rosetta in 2011.
Rosetta 2 is quite efficient (surprised even myself) as is, without having to run native code. The Intel version of Astro Pixel Processor on a M1 Mac Mini ran about twice as fast as it did natively on a dual Xeon Mac Pro from 2009 (that Mac Pro has 8 processors, each running 2+ GHz). One of my antenna modeling programs (purely number crunching and Cocoa graphics) also ran twice as fast, causing me not to even recompile it.
That being said, there are many libraries out there that are not yet "universal" (i.e., with both Intel and ARM components). So, to release an application for the Mac (e.g., ASIStudio), ZWO would need to release two different versions of ASIStudio for the Mac. You may have to wait until all the libraries that are used by ASIStudio are Universal before they release a version that will run natively on both x86_64 and ARM64 Macs.
Case in point is the ffmpeg library (libavcodec, etc), which is needed if you wish to create AVI files that MacOS and iOS AVFoundation libraries do not support. There is an ffmpeg library build for x86_64, and there is an ffmpeg build for ARM64, but there is no Universal library (library with components for both x86_64 and ARM64) -- and that is likely because ffmpeg itself depends on dozens and dozens of other open sourced libraries, and those need to also be Universal before ffmpeg can be Universal, and in turn for applications that use ffmpeg to be universal.
I hit the above problem just last week when I tried to use the ffmpeg library on my M1 Macs (experimentation with Wiener whitening of the MTF of AVI files of Jupiter from a small OTA, that is created by ASIAIR). I eventually just compiled against the ARM64 architecture, since the program is for my own consumption only.
Although the M1 uses the ARM instruction set, it is not an ARM chip, but designed from the ground up at Apple. Recall that Apple was one of original owners of the Acorn architecture -- ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machine, so Apple is licensed for perpetuity with the ARM instruction set, no matter who ARM is eventually sold to.
You are correct; although many "drivers" exist in the "server" (for example, a Raspberry Pi as server) too. Many things, like autoguiding cannot afford the latency to not be resident on the server. Others, like the planetarium component, will need to be on the controlling computer or tablet.
The main difference is that ASIAIR provides a turnkey solution (everything menu driven, so the 1,2,3 simpletons can understand), while StellarMate and INDIGO Sky (both of which can also run in a Raspberry Pi) both requires the user to have some intelligence to integrate a fully inter-operating system (guiding, image capture, etc, with components from different manufacturers).
It is just a matter of time before a group of enterprising souls will create such a turnkey integration using INDIGO Sky; that supports a limited number of cameras in a fixed menu, a limited number of mounts in a fixed menu, a limited number of filter wheels in a fixed menu, a limited number of focusers in a fixed menu, etc. (The reason I use INDIGO Sky as the example is because it truly supports macos.)
w7ay I installed StellarMate this week and it works pretty well controlling my mount and cameras. It is not 1,2,3 ;-) But I got it to work with the help of the open sourced community. The trick is to chain INDI servers in a series of INDI servers. I have to admit though, that ZWO did a great job with the GUI of the ASIAIR. Even in its simplicity, it offers great and convenient features StellarMate does not, or not yet. Well, maybe I have not found them yet. Chaining servers in a row is not supported yet by the ASIAIR as far as I can see it.
Since SUN Microsystems came out of a Stanford project (SUN stood for "Stanford University Network") I had the original 68000 based SUN workstation on my desk at the startup I joined (started by a couple of other Stanford CS folks; I was with Radar Astronomy at Stanford -- combining my two hobbies :-).
The Sun crashed all the time that I became good at patching Unix i-nodes back together after a disk crash :-). The server was a VAX-750 running bsd, which virtually never crashed. We went to Apollo workstations after that, before I joined Apple in 1988, and downgraded to a Macintosh II. It was a god sent when Apple finally migrated to Unix :-).
If you just need to connect a Mac to an ASI camera, you can use one of the applications that are in the ASIStudio suite. You can find it at ZWO's download web page, and there is a native MacOS version. The MacOS versions works fine on an M1 Mac Mini and an M1 MacBook Pro (Big Sur).
I have an issue with the in-built Camera on my HP ENVY Laptop 17-ae0xx that seems intermittent. The installed operating system is Windows 10 Home OS build 19041.508. In the past, a cold boot has temporarily fixed the problem. In Device Manager, when working, there is a group for Camera. The first Driver is for "HP IR Camera" with Provider Realtek. The last time I could see this in Device Manager, it showed Driver Version 10.0.17134.20048. The second Driver is for "HP Wide Vision FHD Camera" with Provider Realtek. The last time I could see this, it also showed Driver Version 10.0.17134.20048.
When not working, there is no Camera group shown in Device Manager. The WIndows store Camera application reports 'We can't find your camera' with an error code "0x0A00F4244". Microsoft Teams in Settings Devices shows Camera with None in the list that can be selected.
In the Windows Event viewer, I can see some entries where the Description is "The Windows Camera Frame Server service terminated unexpectedly" and EventID is 7034. However, I do not see a similar entry for that each time I start the computer.
A further update from the experiments on 2020-10-05. In short, I have not seen an issue today.
I have repeated multiple times running the Camera app and the Microsoft Teams video preview, and the image has displayed each time. I have tried restarting Windows and still did not see an issue today.
This is all positive, but I do not know what has changed to improve things. I expect it will make sense to close this ticket soon as things stand.
It seems unlikely to me that there is a hardware problem, and I speculate that it is rather software compatibility issue. I have no reason to suspect that my anti-virus software is blocking the camera, and I have already experimented with the Windows camera settings, but I have not resolved the problem. I can temporarily see the images captured by the camera sometimes before a problem occurs which seems to be at the device driver level. Note, I have downloaded a tool from Nirsoft called DevManView v1.71 that seems to me useful to display information about device drivers and their properties as an alternative to Device Manager.