I have now tried to get 3 different cameras to work in Ekos, 2 of which failed, and one which appears to record only in black & white. All 3 cameras are detected by Ekos. As best as I understand it, I have these cameras properly connected and set up.

Below are screen grabs of my attempts at capturing a frame using the camera control module in Ekos, and their listed errors. The cameras are a Nikon D5100, Nikon 1 J4, and Nikon D600. Of the 3, only the D600 was successfully able to capture and image, but the image was in black & white.

Another thing that I don't understand is that I went to save the image captured by the D600 as a JPEG, using the FITS viewer, but when I look at the file that I saved, it is saved as a FITS, even tho I specified saving as a JPEG.

If anyone can shed some light on why these things are happening, I would greatly appreciate it, as my entire Astroberry setup is at a complete standstill.

Thank you.

Regarding the D600 and black and white images: all images need to be debayered first. Make sure to enable auto-debayering in the KStars preferences.

Thanks for your reply. Not sure why that would be off, but that did the trick for the D600. I guess no clue why the other cameras don't work?

Great that you managed to solve the B/W issue. Sorry, I have no experience with Nikon cameras.

I could take a guess, but also not experienced with DSLRs on Ekos.

DSLR drivers used by Ekos are almost always the gphoto library.
If we look at the cameras supported by gphoto: www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php
you can see that the D600 is listed. The D5100 is listed as "PTP mode" and there is a Nikon J4 listed, but is that the same as Nikon 1 J4?

As far as PTP (which apparently is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol), I'm not familiar with that. Is there something you need to set in your camera to make it respond to the PTP protocol?

Probably the simplest way you can debug this, if you were interested in pursuing it, and you were comfortable with running linux command-line programs, would be to run the gphoto client as a stand-along program outside of Ekos. If that can't manipulate your cameras, then for sure Ekos won't either.

See
www.gphoto.org/
www.gphoto.org/doc/manual/ref-gphoto2-cli.html

Hope that points you in the right direction.
Hy

Well, someone posted a link to a video that went over GPHOTO2, and I went through the motions, and got both my Nikon D5100 and Nikon1 J4 to take a picture and download it to the Astroberry. So GPHOTO2 can access the cameras, but Ekos cannot.

Which brings me back to what could I possibly be doing wrong in the setup for these cameras in Ekos, if I can get them to work in GPHOTO2?

To add additionally, I downloaded a program called ENTANGLE, which is a tethering capture GUI interface that works on top of GPHOTO2 and it also works like a charm.

Which once again brings me to what could I possibly be doing wrong in Ekos that it can't capture? This is frustrating, because it's holding up my use of the Astroberry system.

I don't own any of those cameras but I did use my DSLR with Ekos before. So somethings you might want to check on each of the camera that aren't working.
* Are you in BULB mode on the camera?
* Do you have Mirror Lock on or off?
These values need to match with what you have in Ekos, otherwise its just going to be a nightmare. Ekos and Gphoto can't control these, so you need to make sure the values match manually.

I can't remember what happens if the camera isn't in BULB mode but Ekos is, but I do know what happens if you have a mismatch in mirror lock up as the camera will thinks it should put the mirror up waiting for another command but it doesn't receive it, then the camera's mirror lock up will time out.

Basically if you can get gphoto2 to work, you should be able to get Ekos to use the indi_gphoto driver to work, there are aliases for this different type of cameras and since you're getting camera details while it connects that says the driver is working.

Yeah, the camera is in manual mode. There is no mirror lockup option on the D5100, and the J4 is mirrorless. All I keep getting is the error message you see below, which is of absolutely zero help. However GPHOTO2 has no problems controlling the D5100 or the J4.

I think may be done with Astroberry. I've already lost half of the season trying to get this damned thing to work. The only camera it works with is the camera that I DON'T want to use, my full frame D600, and even that has it's problems. I'd hate to have to set up a wired Windows setup, but at least that will work, as opposed to this.

Thanks for your replies.

 

There is the possibility that GPhoto2 shipped with AstroBerry is older than the one used by Entangle which may explain why your cameras are not working with AstroBerry. Did you run Entangle on AstroBerry and did you verify that they are using the same version of GPhoto2?

It is possible to start the INDI server and camera driver manually on the command line. Doing that may reveal the error that happens. I agree of course that the error message isn't helpful at all.

Device support on Windows is more extensive but this is not because Linux is not mature but simply lack of support of the device vendors. Almost all work on GPhoto2, INDI and AstroBerry is done by volunteers without support from the vendors which explains the issues. This of course doesn't help you but perhaps you could redirect your frustration to the vendors instead of the volunteers

I'm not dissing the volunteers, I just frustrated Ekos can't see my cameras and GPHOTO2 can. However I have to say if you didn't have to use the damned terminal at gunpoint to get anything done in Linux, it would probably far more acceptance and support. The terminal is what holds Linux back. Linux is still stuck in 1991. The insistence on using the terminal to get anything done is the reason Linux has gone nowhere in 30 years. It may be the backbone of the internet, but the internet is run by people with computer science degrees. I don't want to go and get a computer science degree to try and figure out why I can't get my cameras to work in Ekos. I just want to set up, and shoot astrophotography, not SUDO and GREP. Windows and Macs have terminals too, but no one needs to use them to get anything done.

There was no GPHOTO2 at all in the Astroberry ISO. When I started typing the commands in this video in the terminal, I got an some error message that essentially alluded that there was no GPHOTO2. I had to install it using the add/remove software panel. After I did that, the commands listed in that video worked in the terminal. Same with Entangle, I installed that as well at someone's recommendation using the add/remove software panel.. I believe Entangle is merely a shell that accesses GPHOTO2, not sure if it has it embedded or not.

The only way I can use Astroberry right now is to use PHD2 to guide. That's it. I can only plate solve through the guide cam, but parallax means I still have to guess where my target is in my main camera, and when you're manually aiming with a single axis tracker at a small target, especially with a high mag scope, that consumes time. I have to use an external intervalometer to control the shutter while PHD2 tracks. I put the Pi right on the rig to avoid having excess cables, as you can see below, but I need to run the extra cable for the intervalometer. If I could control everything from the Pi, I would only have one cable leading into the rig, the power cable.

For the time being I'll continue to shoot this way with the Astroberry, because that's all I can do. If I can't get it to control my cameras I'll have to switch back to a Windows setup. Somebody set up a similar arrangement to the Astroberry using a Windows mini PC with a hot spot, and I may go that route if Astroberry never gets up to speed.

 

I feel like we're close. The fact that INDI can see the camera, and properly identifies it, and that gphoto2 has no problems taking images, suggests to me that there is a setting in the INDI control panel that is incorrect. The DSLR drivers in INDI are very picky about those kinds of things. For example, I see in the log message "forcing BULB mode". That might be a problem (or maybe not). Does your camera have a separate mode on the dial for BULB mode, or do you have to put the dial in manual mode, and adjust the exposure duration to get to bulb mode?

Would you mind posting screenshots of each config screen in the Nikon INDI control panel?