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

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

ASI driver shortfalls

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A proud new owner of ASI294MC Pro here. I used Nikon D7500 for astroimaging before, now learning all the new features of the specialized camera.
Discovered a couple of issues with INDI ASI driver.

First, certain color cameras support the MonoBin mode. When bin=1, it makes no difference. When bin=2 and MonoBin=0, adjacent same colored pixels are collapsed into one. When bin=2 and MonoBin=1, four adjacent pixels are collapsed into a single gray pixel. Higher binning levels work in a similar manner. Of course, all that is done in ASI driver, no hardware advantages as with old CCDs. But I find it useful to bin 2x for focusing and 4x for alignment, for speed and lower noise. And here MonoBin fits nicely. Except currently the indi-asi driver ignores MonoBin flag and treats binned data as bayered. Does Ekos debayer the alignment and focusing images? If not then I'm actually fine. Anyway, it would be nice to fix.

Second, capturing video subframes seems mostly broken. I could make it working by setting offset and size all divisible by 8 and repeating the settings in both video and image INDI control panel tabs. In RAW16 mode FPS floats at 15, which is fine for full frame. ZWO claims, it should go up to 21 at 4096×2160 and 40 at 1920×1080. Do they mean subframes or some sort of in-camera downscale? If latter, does indi-asi support that?

I could try to fix at least some of these issues. But I see a good number of commented out snippets of code in relevant areas, that worries me :) I only have one ASI camera and very little sense of what corner cases and use scenarios are out there.
3 years 7 months ago #58842

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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic ASI driver shortfalls

Hello Konstantin and welcome to INDI forums!

Thank you for the information, I actually never used MonoBin and now I finally understand what it does exactly! So it wouldn't be very difficult to implement this in the driver, you just have to set the CCD capability minus the BAYER flag. It's already done when you take photos in Lum 8 mode. Regarding video frame, is the division by 8 issue limited to ASI294MC? I have two ZWO cameras here and last I tested, video mode works on both. Please note that since there is a lot of work to get the data from the camera to the client, the FPS would always be lower than what is expected. The binary data has to encoded base64, sent over the network to the client, then decoded again and displayed, so this all caries some overhead, but at the same time it is what allow full network transparency at the protocol level. You could perhaps achieve such frame rates when you perform recording since no frames are sent to the client so it's direct camera --> disk.

We'd welcome any PRs to fix any of these issues, and we're happy to clarify any development or code issues along the way!
3 years 7 months ago #58845

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Replied by Sonny Cavazos on topic ASI driver shortfalls

Knro, is there a guide for developing INDI-Drivers? I would like to learn how to help in this.

I found some stuff for INDI is on GitHub, some in on KDE development site, I would like to look at the existing to try and figure out how things work.

Thanks.
3 years 7 months ago #58872

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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic ASI driver shortfalls

Yes there are several guides.

1. indilib.org/developers/driver-howto.html
2. indilib.org/developers/developer-manual.html
3. www.indilib.org/api/index.html

The INDI Github shows you how to fork and then start development on your fork..etc.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Sonny Cavazos
3 years 7 months ago #58875

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Sent out a PR for MonoBin.
Video question is still open. I will try to approach it... Recently I tried to take a video of Jupiter and any cropping wouldn't work, from unusable SER file to plain crash. Only uncropped video worked, which is a huge waste of speed and disk space.
Last edit: 3 years 3 months ago by Konstantin Baranov.
3 years 3 months ago #64571

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