I've been trying to get the Pi HQ to work as a guide camera for a few weeks now but have not succeeded yet.

Here is my story:

I have a C-mount to 1.25 inch adapter and then use the HQ camera in a Svbony 50mm guidescope (190mm focal length).

With either raspistill or RPi_Cam_Web_Interface, I'm able to get a star field. It is faint with never more than a few starts visible yet astrometry.net is able to resolve the images so it is adequat. See for example: nova.astrometry.net/user_images/3821744#annotated

With my 50mm Svbony guidescope and its focal length of 190mm, the field of view is as follows according to astrometry.net image:
Size: 1.91 x 1.43 deg
Pixel scale: 1.7 arcsec/pixel

My main scope is a 650mm focal length with a Nikon APS-C crop sensors that gives me 2.0 deg wide field of view. The guidecope would thus have a near 1:1 field of view and nearly matching arcsec/pixel.

Here are my 2 issues: First, I'm trying to get it to work with PHD2 via the indi_v4l2_ccd driver running on the pi. I'm on version 1.8.4 and I'm not able to get good images at night. During the day, I can see in PHD2 daylight images of what ever the guide camera is pointing too. At night however, I get a lot of noise (white dots all over that change position on every shot) and can't get stars. I obviously have an exposure, white balancing or gain issue.

Second problem is that indi_v4l2_ccd (or V4L2 by itself) does not support the camera's high resolution out-of-the-box. Someone has identified that if you manually set the camera resolution before starting indi, then it works but at that resolution, PH2 complains and I get no images (daylight or night). BTW: I use the following cmd:
v4l2-ctl -v width=4056,height=3040,pixelformat=BGR3

If anyone has figured this out yet, let us know. I'm going to upgrade to indilib 1.8.5 and continue hunting from there. I'l also try to see if I can get exposure/gain to work at when imaging using commandline v4l2 tools instead of indilib.

Would you share some log excerpts Marc?

-Eric

Just finally got my HQ cam in the mail. Still waiting for my c-to-t adapter before I can properly test.
12mp is excessive and, as someone mentioned, light sensitivity is not the best, so I was thinking of doing the following:
1. Mate it with a svbony guidescope (30mm aperture, 120mm focal; not the widest but better than the official rp hq cam lenses, and a solid fixed focuser).
2. Do pixel binning - dual advantage of reducing file size and increasing sensitivity. Still will have sufficient angle per pixel since I’m planning on using a aps-c sensor dslr with a 200-600mm focal as main imager

Will try and work out the software kinks waiting for the c-to-t adapter, and the guiding thereafter. Will let you know how that goes!

Did you have any luck using the HQ camera?

No I did not succeed and I moved on to use a TC7 (ASI120 clone) and it works. With the PI HQ, I could not get it to take images in the dark that looked anything like a star field with INDI. When I used some of the Raspbian web-based video tools. I was able to see bright star. This tells me the HQ camera can image in the dark but that it was INDIlib that could not configure it correctly. Note that back then, I was using the V4L2 driver. Am I mistaking or is there a driver for the the HQ camera now?

So I used the V4L2 driver and it never occurred to me to check for a native driver but there is a rpicam driver here: github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty/tree/master/indi-rpicam

The comments in cameracontrol.h states:
"Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera CCD Driver for Indi."

I'm new here interested in building the Pi4 server as part of the autoguider camera enclosure. Can you recommend a pi camera model suitable for autoguiding? Can the HQ bin under PHD controls? Does binning effectively increase the pixel size?

Thanks

Am revisiting the idea this weekend - had dropped it as my RPi4 died and I had moved to another SBC (NanoPC T4) that is hardly drop-in compatible to the Rpi camera lineup.

However, am currently having worse and worse performance from my T7C, I found a solution to both the NanoPC compatibility and inconsistent pi cam support in INDI:
www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-...amera-as-usb-webcam/

It’ll use a 10$ Pi Zero to turn the Pi Cam HQ into a USB UVC webcam. From there, it should JustWork (TM). I gain almost 100% sensor size, going from 1/3.2" to 1/2.3", smaller pixel size even with 2x2 binning and faster bandwidth. Down the road, also possibility of bluetooth connection if needed (although then still need to power the Pi Zero which is powered via usb otg anyway) and to add other pi-compatible sensors (thinking GPS/temp/humidity). Funnily, Arducam sells a picam-to-uvc board, for 100$. Here total cost will be 12-13$ (board + small SD card).

To be continued soon

Hi,

I do not know about your luck but I finally made guiding with HiQ camera working and it seems I have brilliant results.

SNR for 35/135 and 60/330 telescopes is baffling 300-800.

Now the hard part How I made it work.

So I used indi-rpicam driver. That driver has few faults, downloading is slow ~7s, and as I found out later 1s exposure does not work, binning is not implemented.
So I edited driver, first thing I did is hardcoded 2x binning and this instantly reduced download speed to ~1s and from ekos images were brilliant
But every time I tried to turn on PHD it got stuck and timeouted. Later on I noticed that even from EKOS 1s exposure would freeze whole cam. So i went code digging and foud oart of code that says if shutter_speed > 100000(1s) do something too smart for my brain to understand. But i noticed it is only bigger than 1s so I added >= there and that solved all of my problems.

After this I have brilliant guiding performance, on around 20 targets I pointed to i never had trouble finding guidestar, and lowrst SNR I got from 1s was ~200

In the thread below(end of page 6) you can find changes I did for enabling binning

indilib.org/forum/ccds-dslrs/6990-driver...camera.html?start=60

I will not make pull request for this as it is hardcoded binning, and my free time and knowledge about ekos is not good enough.

As for 1s bug, I do not have code at the moment but search for 1000000, there is not much millions in code, and replace > with >=

I will maybe make a pull request for this fix in near future if i configure git.

Quick guide how to install this edited driver:

Clone git for indi 3rd party if you knkw. git or just download only indi rpicam.
github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty
Save it to
~/Projects/indi-3rdparty/indi-rpicam
Then open Terminal and type this only first time(prerequisite):
I made all this from my phone so typos and errors might happen.
And that is it, you are good to go.
Happy coding and happy guiding.

You may have solved my issue I've had the past couple weeks where my Rpi camera crashes on EKOS load while trying to use it for autoguiding! I can't find the driver file though - I know I have it installed because I can see it and select in in EKOS, but on Stellarmate OS I'm unable to find where the actual driver file itself is to make that code change... You wouldn't happen to be using Stellarmate also, would you? Or perhaps you know a shortcut to get to the drivers files from within KStars/EKOS? Thank you!

Hi

I am using astroberry not StellarMate but it is all linux it should be the same or similar enough.

Follow this post, you can download zip of thr file there:

indilib.org/forum/ccds-dslrs/6990-driver....html?start=72#82546

For the first attempt you can maybe try to just unpack zip and type in terminal:
sudo make install
it might work if not follow full guide how to build it.

Following those instructions only gets me so far... I don't have a Projects/INDI-3rd-party folder in the same location as that script suggests. I'm looking through the file system now to see where the 3rd party folder is on StellarMate so I can execute the second half of your script. I got the prerequisites installed perfectly though, so thank you for getting me started.