camera driver development

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y3000
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Joined: Fri Mar 15, 2024 12:56 am

camera driver development

#1

Post by y3000 »

I have some industrial camera with SDK, if I want to develope the camera driver myself uses in SharpCap, is there any document or information about the camera driver with SharpCap development ?
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Re: camera driver development

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

there is currently no way for people to add a new brand of cameras to SharpCap and get full support. If you want to develop the integration yourself then you have two options

1) Write or use a DirectShow driver for the camera. There are limitations for DirectShow drivers, including that images must be 8 bit, RAW modes are not supported and exposure can only be changed in one stop steps. Directshow will support good frame rates though. Various bits of sample code for writing DirectShow drives can be found in Microsoft documentation, and I would expect that there are a few on Github too that you could investigate and learn from. The code will need to be C/C++


2) Write an ASCOM driver for the camera. There are also limitations for ASCOM, but they are different - high frame rates are hard to achieve, but you can use high bit depths, RAW modes and the exposure can be changed without a step size issue. Unfortunately only the exposure and gain controls are surfaced by the ASCOM interface, so any additional controls would need to be implemented in a 'Setup Window' for the camera that can be shown from SharpCap. Code can be written in C# and there is a wizard for creating the boilerplate to fill in as part of the ASCOM Platform developer downloads (see https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/Index.htm).

Hope this helps,

Robin
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