Guiding with a webcam

[Roy]

All,

I was wondering if a Point Grey GS3 webcam could be made to work with PHD v2.  I am told that WDM is a nonstarter and that many webcam apps make use of DirectShow.  I don't see DirectShow support in PHD2.  I do see "OpenCV webcam 1" and "OpenCV webcam 2"; not sure if this means connecting with two separate OpenCV webcams or OpenCV v1 and v2. Trying both with a PGR GS3 attached operated the laptop's user facing webcam; this cannot be what was intended for a guiding application. or could it????  Hmm. . .

the other comment that I found was "OpenCV vision is not machine vision".  Does that apply to me?

Do I have some options?

Thanks.

Roy

[Andy Galasso]

>>> I am told that WDM is a nonstarter

Why not? Lots of people use WDM webcam in PHD2. It sounds like you have the camera, so give it a try.

The 1 and 2 with OpenCV webcam refer to 2 different cameras on the same computer. Not sure why they would have both opened the built-in webcam, could be a bug or a problem with OpenCV not recognizing the GS3.

Andy

[Roy]

Point Grey did not create whatever WDM driver, too old tech I guess.

OpenCV may still be possible.  I expected the Settings button to light up but it didn't.  Never got the option to choose a camera.

Roy

[Andy Galasso]

Ok, that's too bad. It seems the camera is not going to work with PHD2.

Andy

[Roy]

It seems that Point Grey expects the video imaging app to access their software with DirectShow or use their specific SDK.  Perhaps some folks out there with video programming experience knows what that means.

As a user I would have thought that any camera that plugs into the USB port of a Windows PC would be recognized as an imaging device to any imaging app and could be controlled with a set of common commands, enough for PHD2 to do its work.  Either DirectShow is the modern incarnation of what WDM used to do or perhaps Point Grey is going in its own direction.

Here are excepts of my conversation with the Point Grey support team:

We downloaded the software [PHD2], and cannot find a way for our cameras to work with it.

We do not have an ASCOM driver, or a WDM driver, which is what this software seems to require.

There is an option in the software for an OpenCV webcam.  Looking at code examples, this is just capturing through opencv from a webcam, so this is still blocked by the lack of a webcam (WDM) driver.  For openCV applications, we always suggest grabbing with our SDK and then processing with openCV, since openCV does not support Vision standards like GigEVision, USB3Vision, etc.

So from what we can tell, our cameras will not work on this software.

We do have a DirectShow interface in fc2, and many 'webcam' applications may support DirectShow.

The primary purpose for this camera (a Grasshopper3 with the Sony Pregius CMOS sensor) is Sun, Moon and planets so not being able to use this camera as a guidecam is only a minor frustration.  This sensor is 10x the size of the DSI, so it is a "nice to have".

Time to take another look at the Starlight Xpress Lodestar.  Are those ten years old yet?

Roy