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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

raspberry pi NoIR camera board


I don't own one, but it should in principle work as an autoguider in EKos if selected as such. Please let us know if you can get it working as an autoguider in Ekos!
10 years 2 days ago #876

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Replied by Bob on topic raspberry pi NoIR camera board

Hi,

I don't think Jasem has a Rpi camera in his setup, but Autoguiding is exactly why I 'm playing around with the camera board too.

I have access to a 3D printer, so printed a case for the camera with a 1.25" OD connection and an ID to match the end of my stock 9x30 finderscope (hope to upgrade to a 50mm one sometime soon) - I can push the camera onto the end and use it afocally (don't fancy removing the RPi cam lens if I can help it). So far, I've not had any clear skies to try it out on an actual star, but the new driver seems to work pretty well and I can get views of distant streetlights out of my window, which is promising... as soon as I get a clear night I'll be giving it a proper go.

I'm also hopeful I can use the camera for plate solving, but that's a whole new story.

I'll be interested to hear back with your experiences of the NoIR camera board - I think this has the potential to be a really cheap and effective way of autoguiding, as well as a way of freeing up a USB port.

Cheers
Bob.
10 years 2 days ago #878

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Hey Bob,
Good to know others have the same idea. Thought I would give a quick update of the project. I have the housing mostly done for the Raspberry Pi and Pi NoIR Camera . Everything came out better than I had planned. I'm still going to try things out tonight and will let you know if things work ok.
9 years 11 months ago #896

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Replied by Bob on topic raspberry pi NoIR camera board

Hi, John, your case looks spot-on! Have you had any joy auto guiding yet?

Just getting back onto this project after being away on holiday. Still not had any clear skies to try the setup out, so am taking the opportunity to design a new printed case for the pi to sit on top of my scope better and seal it up against moisture ingress. I'll update as soon as I have it done (hopefully by end of the week).
9 years 11 months ago #992

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Hi Bob, I haven't had chance to give everything a try yet.. I just got back from Las Vegas a few days ago ;-) I have some minor tweaking to do to the case (the CCD isn't quite centered), and I need to mill out the eyepiece part just a bit more. I'll spend some time doing that in the next few days.

I also started wondering about another possibility: what about making the raspberry pi with a pi noir camera, function as a stand alone Ethernet (or WiFi) connected guide camera, with its own corresponding indi device driver. It would function like any other guide camera at this point, interacting with KStars & Ekos using its indi driver. This is REALLY where I would love to get this and could be a nice low-cost alternative for us DIY astronomers --- but I'm no programmer.
9 years 11 months ago #1009

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The idea of having the Raspberry Pi with a Pi Camera function as a stand-alone autoguider, might not be as hard as I first though.. I did some looking and found a Pyhon library for directly controlling the camera:

$ sudo apt-get install python-picamera
Documentation is here :

The cool thing is that, not only can you capture images to a file, but also to a network stream, or a OpenCV object.

All I would have to do write python socket server using the python camera library. The socket interface to the client would allow the indi device driver to control the camera. I think writing the indi device driver for it would be harder to do.. Does this seem reasonable Asem?
9 years 11 months ago #1010

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Please use indi_v4l2_ccd driver instead of legacy indi_v4l driver. Please select V4L2 CCD from Ekos and try again, let me know how it goes.
9 years 11 months ago #1026

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Hey knro, I don't think I did a very good job of explaining what want to do. I already have the pi noir camera working using the indi_v4l2_ccd driver. That seems to work well.

Right now I have the pi_camera and raspberry pi enclosed in a smallish metal housing that mounts directly into the eyepiece (you can see a photo of in another of my posts above). The pi runs indiserver and the indi_v4l2_ccd driver, indi_lx200_autostar and a focus_wheel driver. It all works relatively well however, because the raspberry pi runs the main indiserver, all the wires for the other devices have to come up to that box on the eyepiece, which is less than ideal.

My thought was, if I could make my raspberry pi and pi_camera box function just like a commercial CCD camera (a qhy camera for instance), I could have another raspberry pi, just running indiserver, functioning as the "hub" for all the devices, with only a single ethernet cable coming down from the pi_camera box. Here is a drawing of what I was thinking.

My understanding from reading the development documents is that my pi_camera/raspberry pi box would run my custom C++ or python code that would function as a socket server over ethernet (or wifi), basically making it an ethernet controlled camera. My other raspberry pi would run the indiserver with my own "custom" indi_ccd driver that would talk with my raspberry pi_camera using the socket/port to issue commands to the pi_camera and send images back through indiserver to ekos in kStars...

Guess I was just wondering if you thought this makes sense to you?
9 years 11 months ago #1038

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If I'm understanding this correctly, you are planning to run two INDI servers separately on two RPIs? If that's the case, then it is easily managed by INDI server since you can chain INDI servers. That is, you can start INDI server on RPi#1 connected to the camera, then start INDI server on RPi#2 connected to the focuser and scope, but when you start the 2nd INDI server, you chain to the first INDI server.

on RPI#1 (assuming IP address 192.168.1.10)
indiserver -v indi_v4l2_ccd

on RPI#2 (assuming IP address 192.168.1.11)
indiserver -v indi_lx200autostar indi_robo_focus 'V4L2 CCD'@192.168.1.10

Then in Ekos, you just set 192.168.1.11 as the remote INDI server and you shall be connected to all your devices once you connect! I hope this is what you're looking for!
9 years 10 months ago #1053

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Morning sirs,

I'm pretty new to this community and just starting with Kstars (VM under Windows, all devices connected to a Raspberry). So far I enjoy the whole setup alot. I am also using the indi_v4l2_ccd driver on the Raspberry Pi cam which seems to be fine so far as all control elements show up properly BUT: The cam/driver does not seem to react properly to changes in the parameters i.e. when I increase the exposure time it sticks with the default no matter what I enter. When enter the exact sensor data of the Pi cam and hit save, it does not store these permanently and shows the defaults on the next program start. Lastly when I increase the resolution of the pic to be captured to anything larger than the default (1024x768) then it hangs forever. Anyone any ideaas on this?

Thank you very much

Tonio
7 years 9 months ago #9109

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I have actually the same problem with the pi NoIR Camera Module (v2). With other applications it's possible to controll everything but there seems to be an bug in the indi driver. I have not found an solution yet - maybe anyone else has in idea ?

Some values seem to work for me but it's behaving a little bit strange.

Thanks and advance,
Dominik
7 years 2 weeks ago #15101

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