James replied to the topic 'Indi and EKOS with Canon M3/10/100/6' in the forum. 1 year ago

The M10 does have a USB port, but like several of the other M models it is intended for photo management, not control. The Canon SDK does not support these models at all. I think gphoto can only control them over USB because Canon left just enough in to support the smartphone app, but the camera certainly doesn't like to be controlled over USB that way.

Using USB, the camera becomes visible to Indi and gphoto can trigger a capture, but changing any settings (including ISO and exposure time) will freeze the camera. Indi (rightly) attempts to read and write those settings on connect, and that freezes the camera straight away. If you get bulb mode working, let me know, but I believe the way to do this through gphoto is by changing settings to start and stop the exposure, which I imagine will freeze it if connected over USB, though Wifi should be fine. The M10 has no bulb capability whatsover, using gphoto or even CHDK, though CHDK allows me to set exposure times longer than 30s.

CHDK is an interesting side-path. If I load CHDK on the camera and connect to it over USB, then gphoto2 still causes it to freeze when changing settings. When connecting to it over wifi, gphoto2 shows me a completely different set of settings to when the Canon firmware is running. It seems the crucial iso/exposure settings are missing, presumably because it expects these settings to be changed using CHDK's own API not gphoto's ptpip. The CHDK firmware most certainly does allow USB control and changing of settings on my M10, because there are several existing programs that can do it, but not in a way that Indi (or ASCOM) could use without a whole new driver. I feel gphoto's ptpip/wifi support could easily be added to the existing gphoto_ccd driver, so I'm focusing on that for now.

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