Hallo,
I've got a problem with the indi_rpicam driver.
The exposure time i set in ekos does not change the picture exposure for exposures longer than 1 sec. It take the requested time to have a picture ex 30sec but the light in the image is not changing, for time shorter than 1sec it works as aspected.
In raspistill it all works as aspected.
My best regards.

After a rpi-update all is working as aspected.

Hi there,

I'm playing around with the HQ camera and INDI. Unfortunately the camera ignores all exposure settings over 1000ms. Should that be so ? Isn't there actually 200000 ms max?

Hi there,

I found a solution.

1. Connect Ekos to the Raspberry HQ Cam
2. just set the exposure to higher 10 sec, maybe 20sec
3. Set the gain
Now you can play with the settings and they will be applied.
If I set the gain before exposure, they will all be ignored.


Tino

Nice work, Ill see if I can rearrange the code to run gain settings after timing perhaps solves it..

Im also working on improving the speed for downloading the image, i've gone from about 40s to a few seconds now.

I need to understand how to set debug level and received debug message from my PyIndi python testing client. The documentation is very goon on how to send debug messages from a driver, but I don't understand how to get the debug messages through to the client. Ping @knro

You can set debug level in Options --> Debug --> Enable/Disable. THis just enables and disable the debug. Then there are two options for levels. One that is DEBUG LEVELS, what gets set to the CLIENT so you select what needs to be checked. There is also LOGGING levels and this is when you want to write a FILE.

Beware that if you run Ekos, it will override these and you cannot control them from the driver (technically you can but Ekos will override them). This is because Ekos in the Logs window specify which drivers are logged and which are not. If you are not using Ekos, then you can change the settings as you like.

Thanks Jasem, I think I got it t work. I knew how to do it from within kstars but not from my python client i used for faster test-loops. Think I got it now. Now I just need to understand why the client is not receiving the image. I do get the image in kstars but no blobs are sent to the python client for some reason.

When I turn on debugging now, i see this in my python client as soon as i send the CONNECTION switch to on, is that a timing problem perhaps...

Dispatch command error(-1): INDI: Could not find property CCD_INFO in RPI Camera
<setNumberVector device="RPI Camera" name="CCD_INFO" state="Idle" timeout="60" timestamp="2020-12-29T11:43:04">
<oneNumber name="CCD_MAX_X">
4056
</oneNumber>
<oneNumber name="CCD_MAX_Y">
3040
</oneNumber>
<oneNumber name="CCD_PIXEL_SIZE">
0
</oneNumber>
<oneNumber name="CCD_PIXEL_SIZE_X">
0
</oneNumber>
<oneNumber name="CCD_PIXEL_SIZE_Y">
0
</oneNumber>
<oneNumber name="CCD_BITSPERPIXEL">
0
</oneNumber>
</setNumberVector>

I have the camera working now with exposure times more than 1 s, but the gain needs to be defined always and the default is "unset". I just can't find out how to set a default gain in my driver. There is all those IUFillNumberVector, IDSetNumber, IUUpdateNumber, defineNumber(), registerProperty(), setProperty() that completely confuses me. Anyone knows how to do what I want?
Regards, Lars

Line #207

Last argument is the default value, which you set to 1 here.

To change it directly, mGainN[0].value = XXX whatever value. Once you change gain, then you need to send the value back to the client, so

IDSetNumber(&mGainNP, nullptr);

Great, thanks a lot. I found that when I used kstars it did not use that default value of 1 (which the value '--' means i suspect). Instead it was using a gain of 2. Then I realized that the ~/.indi/RPI Camera_config.ini on the actual raspberry (not my laptop) it is set to 2. I guess it kind of makes sense to have the config file saved on the actual device and not the laptop connecting to the device (but not super clear).

Ill take back that. I cant get more than 1 sec exposure without first taking a 20 sec exposure for the camera to kind of synchronize. As I understand the camera is then measuring and adjusting settings. There must be a way to set all values fixed, still looking for that.

Ok, let me know if I can help in anyway.