Reinstalled ABerry (rPi4), installed sv305 and everything works! Now, before I delve into the minutiae, what are some common settings folks here are using for guiding with the sv305 (not the Pro version) ? From comments I'll probably use PHD2, and this will be the *first* time I'm using guided capture, so I'll be spending some time in simulation to get a feel. Any recommendations are helpful - my equipment are: azeq5 mount, sv305 guider through a 60mm SVBONY guide scope, ZWO asi294MC (uncooled) through an Orion f4 Mak Cass (extended to something like 2300mm and thus narrower effective fstop). Targets will start with moon and bright planets, then I'll want to quickly seek out some darker stuff. Thanks for the great help from the forum!
MG!IFOS=> That's the same camera/guide scope/computer platform I am using (except I am using Ubuntu Mate 20.04). I had the best luck with 4x4 bin (as I have said above) with PHD2. 1 second exposure is good for deep sky, but you are going to have to back it down a bit for the Moon and maybe Jupiter as well. About 50-60% gain seems to be a good starting point. I find the guide scope focuses with that camera set at about 2.3 using the scale on the tube. That might save you a few minutes of fiddling to get an image.
I also own an iEQ30 Pro, and you don't need an ST4 camera for PEC record. Using serial pulses works nice for me.
I did many tests in "real conditions" (on Mars) these days. No more "Gain settings" issues. Pull Request on it's way...
Thanks again Sarwar.
Sorry to be so late. Clouds, clouds, clouds.... One month of clouds...
I'm waiting for an SV305 Pro sample from SVBony, in order to fix the driver.
I've been using my SV305 (standard) as a guide camera with PHD2. It does really well with the driver, and the gain error on startup isn't an issue with guiding. Thanks again for all your work!
Yes the skies have been poor lately in oxfordshire as well. but did get some clear skies yesterday and the day before. And the camera did stop responding on both nights after some use. Not entirely sure. logs show time out to calls. Restarting driver/indiserver did not help - had to power cycle the camera. Not entirely sure if it is the hardware or the driver to be honest. It has been cold, but i donot suspect that was the case. Did you notice just timeouts to calls made by the driver?
The last couple of sessions I used the Windows driver for the sv305, since that supports on-camera guiding. I was having stability issues even with that until I switched the camera to 8-bit. I kept getting what seemed like overexposed frames.
I do recall however, that when using the indi driver via astroberry, I would have to reseat the usb cable to get the camera to reconnect. Restarting driver/indiserver likewise did not help. This was about a month ago though, so I may be misremembering. I'll pay special attention to it the next chance I get.
You're welcome, but you know, I'm just a selfish guy that wanted to use this camera on Linux
@Sarwar
No, I nether experienced this timeout issue, but like Gingerbread, I noticed that switching multiple times between 8 bits and 12 bits hangs sometimes the camera.
A cold restart is then needed.
Back for 4 weeks of confinement in France... Damn COVID...