After a month of clouds I now have some clear skys and am continuing my efforts to try and get my setup working smoothly with INDI. So far I have it controlling the mount and guiding, but I am having trouble getting my Canon 650D DSLR to work right.

Using Kstars, I can detect and connect to the DSLR, and I can even take captures on the *Focus* tab. When I try to use the Live Preview or Stream, it just opens up a window that's completely black. Sometimes this freezes up the connection and I have to disconnect and reconnect to the camera.

I've read on these forums about people using the live view stream, and to me thats one of the most useful features, but I cannot seem to get it to work. Has anyone else experienced this?

The second issue I have, and the one stopping me from imaging so far is trying to get the Canon to focus. No matter what I try I cannot seem to get the focus controls in INDI or Ekos to do anything with my camera, and they often freeze when trying. For now, the only way I am able to focus at all is to disconnect the camera from my laptop, connect it to my phone and use the DSLR Controller app with it's live view.

I'm using the latest Kstars-bleeding/Ekos from the PPA, and I don't see any other posts about these problems so there's a possibility I have something setup incorrectly. Any help is greatly appreciated.


Nothing appears in the logs except "Starting exposure" and "Exposure done"

EDIT: I just tried the functions again to see if I could get any output in the log and the live streaming worked (the first time I've seen that). No ability to focus though.

While in live preview, can you use "Focus in" and "Focus out" button in Ekos focus module? Does the camera react to these?

Actually yea, I just tried it and it did change the focus in live view. The default focus step is so small it's hard to tell the difference until you do a lot of steps.

A couple questions though, in the INDI driver settings, there is an "Auto Focus" item with only a "SET" button. Pressing this button seems to freeze up the driver and requires disconnect/reconnect, what is it for?

Second, the only way that live view is usable for focus (in DSLR Controller and on the camera) is with the 10x zoom. Is it possible to zoom in the live stream in INDI?

Well, it engages the camera's autofocus drive. I added more debug statements so that if something goes wrong then you get some error message. For 10x zoom, how do you do that with GPhoto? And if this is possible with GPhoto, then is it limited to Canon or any other DSLR? Digital zoom?

looks like theres some settings in gphoto2 for it, "eoszoom" and "eoszoomposition". they are both in the INDI control panel under actions, but it looks like the zoom is limited (whatever you put in, it's either 1x or another that looks like 5x?).

So it looks like the functionality might at least be partially there, there just isn't a nice way to use it in the UI.

A quick read on this subject revealed that this is a software zoon, not hardware. Can you confirm this? If this is the case, it can just be implemented in the KStars preview window

Yes, the DSLR does not do hardware zoom in live preview only *software zoom*. It still makes it much easier to focus when you are using something tiny like a star. The advantage of doing it through the camera instead of on the software side is that instead of sending over a full image over and then cropping it on the computer, the camera crops the image and only sends over the chunk that you are zoomed in on.