I'm using the latest version of kStars 2.9.3 under OSX10.12.4 and I'm having trouble connecting my QHY5LIIC camera to it. It works just fine on my Pi so I know that the camera and cable are okay. If I plug in the camera and fire up kStars EKOS gives an error "Unable to establish: QHY CCD".

Here's where it gets strange. If I open PHD2 first and connect to the camera from there, then disconnect then open kStars, everything works. I can connect to the camera just fine and take pictures etc. However, as soon as I unplug and replug the camera, I have to go back to PHD to get it working again. It kind of feels like it must be a driver issue but I'm at a loss for how to fix it. Can anyone help?

Hi gth871r,

It is possible that your firmware is not getting loaded into the camera. The fact that you say that it works if you connect it to PHD2 first and then connect with KStars is a telling sign. As an experiment, can you try connecting to the camera with the INDIServer App from Cloudmakers instead and connect to that from KStars as a "remote" indiserver?

Thanks,

Rob

Nope, still doesn't work. Tell me more about this getting the firmware thing is there a way to manually induce it to do that? It seems like INDI doesn't know how to turn the camera on but if something else turns it on then it will stay on until it gets turned off.

Basically, a number of cameras need to have their firmware files loaded from the computer onto the camera after they are connected via usb. When you disconnect the camera, the power is disconnected and that firmware is lost again and must be loaded again when it is connected the next time. On Linux computers, the firmware loading is often achieved with a udev "rules" file so that as soon as the camera gets plugged in, the operating system loads it. On Macs, there are no such rules files built into the operating system and they must instead always be loaded by the software. In PHD, the qhy firmware is located in the app bundle in /Contents/Resources/qhyfirmware/firmware/. In KStars, it is in the app bundle in /Contents/Resources/DriverSupport/qhy. And in INDIServer app, it is located in the app bundle in /Contents/Resources/. If you use home-brew, the firmware is in /usr/local/lib/indi/DriverSupport/qhy/firmware.

I've got files in both directories and they look like the same files, mostly. On a lark, I tried copying the firmware files from PHD to kstars. That didn't work.

One thing you might want to check is whether these folders all have pretty much the same files in them on your computer. One note is that the INDIServer app has a lot more in the resources folder than just the qhy firmware.

Assuming the files are the same, some issues might be that there could be an issue with either the QHY code that loads the firmware, an issue with the INDI code that is built on top of that, or the file path is different from where the software is trying to load it from.

There were some recent updates to both the QHY code and the INDI code as well as the file structure, but I thought this was stored out.

Evidentally, not. Are there any log files that would be helpful with figuring out what is going on. I'd be happy to send them to whomever is doing the development/debuging on this.

Well I have an idea for you if you want to try an experiment. If you run the indi server from the command line with the qhy driver, you could experiment with the firmware path and see if it loads the firmware properly I don't have a qhy camera so cannot try this anytime soon. I can post the steps required if you like.

Please.

Go to the OS X Terminal.

Type the following to get into the KStars indiserver folder:

cd /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/indi

Connect your camera and turn it on

Then type this command to startup the indiserver with qhy from the command line with very verbose logging:

./indiserver -vvv ./indi_qhy_ccd

Then in KStars make sure you have setup a profile with qhy as the CCD in mode "remote" but with "localhost" as the host.

Try to Start INDI and connect the device. See what happens.

If it doesn't work, or has the wrong path to the firmware (probably, since you did not start it from KStars and it wasn't given the environment variable INDIPrefix), try all this again, but we will tell it where to find the firmware. Do an export command before starting the INDIServer like this:

export INDIPREFIX="/Applications/kstars.app"

Then run the above procedure again.

Still didn't work. Immediately when I started the INDI server it gave me this:

2018-03-28T01:34:07: startup: ./indiserver -vvv ./indi_qhy_ccd
2018-03-28T01:34:07: Driver ./indi_qhy_ccd: pid=3410 rfd=3 wfd=6 efd=7
2018-03-28T01:34:07: listening to port 7624 on fd 4
2018-03-28T01:34:07: Driver ./indi_qhy_ccd: sending msg copy 1 nq 1:
<getProperties version='1.7'/>

2018-03-28T01:34:07: Driver ./indi_qhy_ccd: QHY firmware path: /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/Resources/DriverSupport/qhy
2018-03-28T01:34:07: Driver ./indi_qhy_ccd: read message 'No QHY cameras detected. Power on?'

You also might want to try starting the INDIServer and then connecting the camera, so the same steps, but in a different order and see if that helps