Just to let anyone finding this thread know. My problem does not occur with a Raspberry Pi 4.

Additionally, the creator of oacapture is including the new SDK in the next release. So it should be usable with this camera in all versions after 1.8.0

Read More...

Another update. I connected the camera via an independently powered USB hub and the lock up still occurred. I think this rules out power problems.

Read More...

I put the same SD card into my Raspberry Pi 1 to see if the problem was hardware related. Although the poor hardware could barely run astroberry, it didn't lock up in the same way the Pi 3B did.

I guess that means that my specific problem is not a software problem. I'll look in to getting a Pi 4 and hope for more success! I'll post an update here with my Pi 4 experience.

Read More...

I wrote a reply to this thread but for some reason it didn't post. The gist of it was that I have the ASI 462MC and I can't really get it to work with astroberry.

The only software I've managed to get video from is kstars and if I set it to too high a framerate (~10 fps) the kernel panics and the whole system completely locks up.

I don't know if this is the libASICamera2.so or some other thing specific to the Raspberry Pi Model 3B or the zwo indi driver but I've tried several things and not managed to get it working.

I've attached what I could capture of kernel panics.

Got this camera a couple of days ago and have no end of issues trying to get it to play nice on a raspberry pi 3b

In ocapture I see `(ZWASI2)` in the camera menu when it's connected, however on clicking it gives the error "Unable to connect camera"
In firecapture I click "ZWO" and get "The selected camera could not be started"

I've managed to get images from it in phd2 (although obviously that's no use for capturing planetary footage).
I've managed to get images from it in kstars.


However, here's the biggest issue I have. If I try to stream video from the camera in kstars, I can do so successfully at about 0.25s per frame.
Soon after I lower the exposure time below about 0.2s (and therefore ~5fps framerate) the raspberry pi hardlocks

VNC disconnects, the clock stops ticking, any watch commands in terminals start segfaulting, ssh stops responding. I get a bunch of kernel "oops" messages from running processes.

This consistently happens within a few seconds of starting the video stream.

I've read some topics around pi zeros having issues with video streaming that suggest it can be fixed by setting over_voltage=4. However, I've set it as high as 6 and seen no effect. I've also tried underclocking the cpu.


I wonder if maybe the camera is drawing far too much power. The manual for the ASI462MC says that the maximum power usage is 13.9W (!!!). Which is close to 3A at 5V. I find this incredibly hard to believe as even cooled cameras do not use this much with the cooler running. Plus USB2 spec only provides ~500mA and even USB3 only provides ~900mA.

Any ideas what could be going on here? I've attached some backtraces from `/var/log/kern.log`.

Is there any way I can roll back the libASICamera2.so to see if this is a new issue with the SDK?

I don't have any other ZWO cameras but I've tested video streaming with a logitech c920 using the indi_webcam driver and that seems to work fine (albeit with nearly maxed cpu).

Read More...