Proposal for ASCOM extensions for extra camera controls

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Proposal for ASCOM extensions for extra camera controls

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ASCOM is great - it allows cameras that I've never even heard of to work in SharpCap, but it's limited to allowing only a small set of controls to be manipulated directly by SharpCap (exposure, gain, binning and a few others). Modern CMOS cameras tend to have far more controls available and these all end up hidden behind the ASCOM setup dialog, which isn't ideal.

To improve matters, I'd like to propose developing a standard for ASCOM drivers to make other controls available to SharpCap (and potentially other applications) via the ASCOM SupportedActions/Action API.

At a very high level, the specification might consist of four possible actions :

* LISTCONTROLS : list the names of available controls that the camera makes available
* CONTROLINFO : Get info on a control (minimum, maximum, type, etc)
* SETCONTROL : Set the value of a control
* GETCONTROL : Get the value of a control

While exact syntax for these commands would need to be specified, the only complex one is CONTROLINFO - the info required to define a control might include the following :

* Name
* Type (int/float/bool/choice)
* Min/Max (for int/float controls)
* Step (for int controls)
* writeable (true/false) - some controls might be read only
* readable (true/false) - some controls might be unavailable due to other settings
* reread advised (true/false) - if true then this control may affect other controls or ASCOM properties (like sensor type) - re-reading all controls/properties advised after changing this
* choice list (for choice controls)

Since the ASCOM Action method takes string parameters and returns a string, a suitable serialization method can be chosen for parameters/return values (JSON? INI file format? CSV?).

I'm open to suggestions and feedback from ASCOM driver developers and camera manufacturers on this, particularly for cameras that are not already directly supported in SharpCap.

cheers,

Robin
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