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Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:28 am
by robrj
There's a user on Cloudynights who posted his opensource ASCOM project for Nikon and Canon DSLRs:
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/6255 ... non-nikon/

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:18 am
by cuivenion
Tried it, had a crash with report straight off when I tried to change the ASCOM parameters in Sharpcap. It also hangs on the capture dialog. Nice idea though, and it is only in alpha.

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:56 am
by admin
Ah, that's interesting. I have a canon camera or two, so may have a play. Thanks for the heads up.

cheers,

Robin

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 9:56 pm
by admin
Didn't get time to try this out myself today, but did see the uploaded bug reports from your testing.

Looks like the camera driver is somehow marking itself as being disconnected after SharpCap has connected to it. The bug reports were all 'Not Connected' problems and they were all happening in parts of the SharpCap code that can only be reached when the ASCOM camera is successfully connected, so I am assuming that the driver either says it connects successfully but doesn't or it disconnects itself somehow without being asked.

I will debug the problem more thoroughly over the weekend.

cheers,

Robin

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2018 7:32 am
by Aussie Greg
Any further updates on this one?
I am trying to connect my D7100 Nikon DSLR
Thanks all

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 3:19 pm
by admin
Hi,

I found the driver to only work intermittently for my Canon camera. I suspect this may be the result of SharpCap running exposures in very quick succession which the driver/camera may not be expecting. I do plan to test further when I have some more time.

cheers,

Robin

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2018 9:34 pm
by admin
Just an update to say that I have been working on making SharpCap work better with this driver (and working on making some changes to the driver to make it more robust, faster, etc).

With my own tweaked version of the driver (code available from https://github.com/rwg0/ASCOM.DSLR) I can now get pretty good results with the latest SharpCap 3.2 beta build (3.2.5708) when using a Canon camera in non-live mode. I have been sending my code tweaks to the original author of the driver - hopefully he will include them.

cheers,

Robin

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2018 8:51 pm
by admin
For those that are interested I have uploaded an installer for my tweaked version of the DSLR ASCOM driver - this should work with Canon DSLRs, no idea about others as I have none to test with.

http://downloads.sharpcap.co.uk/downloa ... m%20Driver

This is very much 'without warranty' - if it works, great. If it breaks then you get to keep both halves...

My steps for making it work:

* Install the DSLR driver
* Install the latest SharpCap Beta
* Connect the camera via USB, put it in manual focus and M mode and turn it on
* Run SharpCap and select the ASCOM DSLR driver
* The camera will take 2-3 images while the driver queries various info about the device and saves it. This will happen *before* the controls show in SharpCap
* SharpCap may crash at this point - don't worry, it will (hopefully) only happen once, just restart SharpCap
* After the first few setup exposures, the camera should work correctly. You should be able to change exposure and gain (ISO). Note that the ISO used will be the closest value your camera supports - not necessarily the value shown.

cheers,

Robin

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2018 1:57 am
by galljj
Robin

quite good. I got it to work - one crash report was created and i sent along - but after that, no issue. I have a Canon T1i.


One point - my saved images are coming up in greyscale, although the "live" image in SC is in color. What to do ?
16 bit raw images, saved as .png

j

Re: Ascom driver for Nikon & Canon cameras

Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2018 2:14 am
by galljj
FYI I could create a color image by demosaicing in fitswork4

j