newbie question - camera connection problems

[peteasa]

Hi,

I have a webcam and tried to get this going with INDI and PHD2.  The webcam works fine with kstars and ccdciel and I can take single shots and stream - but in PHD2 I get a warning message that PHD2 does not understand the FITS format for the images from my Alba 10M pixel webcam.

I have read as many of the user guides and "Best Practice Guides" and searched the group for similar issues but have found none so far!

Next I tried my Canon EOS 1100D camera, again this works with other applications for both streaming and for single shot.

PHD2 reports - Unknown image format: .stream - for my Canon EOS 1100D

I can take single shot pictures with PHD2 with the Canon EOS 1100D so that is a step forward but I would rather use streaming!

I have purchased an OpenAstroGuider with Sony Starvis IMX290 webcam in the hope that this will work with PHD2.

Am I missing some configuration settings and if not how easy will it be for me to modify the PHD2 code and add streaming support for my camera's!!??

Peter

[Bruce Waddington]

The only streaming interface supported by PHD2 is WDM, which is a lowest-common denominator approach.  There is no particular advantage to using a streaming interface and therefore we have no plans to do anything beyond WDM.  It sounds like you are trying to operate well outside the norm for guiding so you will probably need to re-think your requirements or find another solution.  If you think you need very high frames for guiding, you will soon have to confront the realities of astronomical seeing and learn those hard lessons. Along the same lines, there is no need for 10 Mpx cameras in guiding, products that are specifically designed as guide cameras will work best.

Bruce

[peteasa]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for your comments.. at least it confirms to me that my decision to purchase a guide scope (OpenAstroGuider) is the best option.  I see from searching the forum that the Sony Starvis IMX290 (2.1M pixel) webcam does seem to have been used by others with PHD2 so that seems like it will work.  

As for WDM I should have been more explicit because I am using Linux so my guess is that PHD2 / INDI Webcam is using video4linux that does have an API to support changing the exposure time and the ISO sensitivity so I am guessing that PHD2 on Linux will use these to manage the quality of the images taken.  The problems I have had in the past with the Alba 10M pixel webcam are that the webcam seems to be in control of the ISO sensitivity and I have not been able to put that into manual mode.  My hope is that Sony Starvis IMX290 webcam exposes more manual control so that PHD2 can control the image quality.

Peter

[bw_m...@earthlink.net]

I think you have a misconception about how PHD2 works in this area.  It doesn’t try to “manage” or “optimize” the camera settings, that’s up to you.  You need to set the camera gain, carefully focus the guide camera, then build a dark library for the gain you’ve chosen.  That should be a one-time operation and settings can be left alone for the most part.

 

Regards,

Bruce

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[Bryan]

Peter

more on Bruce's point.

The PHD2 Best Practices and Documentation will be very helpful in allowing YOU to set the camera for best performance.

Bryan

[peteasa]

Hi Bruce and Bryan,

Thanks for your comments.  As I mentioned I have looked over the best practices documents and neither helped with my specific problem of connecting my cameras.  I will just have to wait till I get my Sony Starvis IMX290 (2.1M pixel) webcam and hope that that will connect.  

On your sub comments about what PHD2 does or does not do once I have a working camera - I noticed in the PHD2 Architecture document the following sentence: "Cameras have properties to communicate their interesting hardware properties, such as whether they have gain control, can take subframes, have a shutter, etc. There are methods to connect, disconnect, prepare to capture images and to actually capture an image. Almost half of the PHD code is associated with supporting the ~25 cameras that PHD supports."  - my point is I have no misconceptions about what PHD2 does or does not do once I have a camera that works with PHD2 - in short PHD2 provides the software to allow me to set my camera up for guiding.  The other perhaps more significant half of PHD2 is dedicated to providing the software to calibrate, align and guide my telescope mount.  All very clever stuff!

Peter.

[peteasa]

If anyone stumbles upon this thread and is interested.. PHD2 is easy to compile...

My initial guess was that the "Unsupported type or read error loading FITS file" message I got came from the cfitsio library.. so I build the latest cfitsio library and PHD2 code and found the same problems.

Next step was to look at phd2/cam_indi.cpp where the error occurs and I find that the HDU number of axis is expected to be 2.. with INDI Webcam and the IMX290 USB camera I am using OpenAstroGuider with 2.9u pixel size the fits file has NAXIS = 3 / number of data axes .. so the phd2 code can't handle this type of image. 

Now I am using Linux so I can look at what the sensor supports: 

/dev/video0 Index : 0 Pixel Format: 'MJPG' Discrete 1920x1080 .. 1280x720 .. 640x480 .. 320x240 : 15, 20, 25, 30 fps 

/dev/video0 Index : 1 Pixel Format: YUYV 4:2:2 Discrete 640x480 .. 320x240 : 30.000 fps 

/dev/video2 Index : 0 Pixel Format: 'H264' Discrete 1920x1080 .. 1280x720 .. 640x480 .. 320x240 : 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 fps

INDI Webcam seems to find it difficult to select /dev/video0 Index : 0 so by default it give me Index : 1  Pixel Format: YUYV 4:2:2.. - unfortunate because I only get 640x480 images.... working on that at the moment.

Anyway back to phd2.. simply by changing the code to accept NAXIS = 3 allows me to at least see an image in phd2 and allows the loop exposures to work so it will be interesting to see how I get on with the guiding part!!

    if (nhdus != 1 || naxis < 2)
    {
        pFrame->Alert(_("Unsupported type or read error loading FITS file"));
        PHD_fits_close_file(fptr);
        return true;
    }

It is not clear to me at the moment why PHD2 should restrict itself to naxis == 2.. I have no idea what NAXIS is but it could well be the three colours of the image - so why not say 0 naxis < 1 so that greyscale and colour images would be supported.

I have not found an option yet for INDI Webcam to restrict the number of colour or convert to greyscale but anyway that sound a bit of over kill as all I am doing is guiding.

Peter.