Category Archives: Computing

libudev to the rescue!

Posted on October 5, 2014 by james

Well, on Linux at least, for the moment… Some time ago when I was writing part of oaCapture I wanted to be able to tell whether the currently connected camera was a Philips SPC900. Ideally, given that I knew, say, … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Computing, Linux | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Debugging FireWire on recent Linux kernels

Posted on September 1, 2014 by james

As part of the development of my planetary capture software I’ve been trying to sort out some problems with IIDC FireWire cameras. They’re not easy to get hold of these days. At least, not at “spare change” kinds of prices. … Continue reading →

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Resolved: Mythbuntu manual shutdown

Posted on September 1, 2014 by james

The last remaining issue I’ve had since my Mythbuntu upgrade a few days ago was that when the “exit and shutdown” option was selected from the frontends, nothing happened. This had worked without a problem on previous installs. I have … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, MythTV | Leave a comment

MythTV upgrade to 0.27

Posted on August 27, 2014 by james

Everyone else is away for a couple of days so I took the opportunity to upgrade our Mythbuntu installation from 0.26 to 0.27 last night.  It turned out much simpler than I expected.  We have a backend and several frontends, … Continue reading →

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FireWire/IIDC over USB camera support in oaCapture

Posted on August 14, 2014 by james

I’ve had a cheap little Point Grey monochrome USB Firefly MV camera sitting about for some time. I don’t know if they’re still around, but they used to sell on ebay for not very much. Point Grey are one of … Continue reading →

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Support for Imaging Source cameras on OSX in oaCapture

Posted on August 14, 2014 by james

I’ve done a fair bit of hacking on Ken Tossell’s userspace UVC camera library of late, adding support for bulk mode transfers, extending support for some other features and fixing a few bugs.  That doesn’t necessarily help me on Linux, … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy, Computing | Tagged | 5 Comments

Planetary imaging on a MacBook/OSX

Posted on August 13, 2014 by james

Well, ok, so I’ve not actually done it, but it should at least now be possible using oaCapture. Using a bundle of bits from the macports repository I now have oaCapture building on 64-bit OSX and it appears to work … Continue reading →

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Access to all camera controls in oaCapture

Posted on August 13, 2014 by james

I’ve now added functionality to provide access to all the supported camera controls in a single popup in oaCapture.  In the general case I suspect many of these will not be required, but if you want to fiddle with everything … Continue reading →

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oaCapture QHY5L-II support

Posted on August 13, 2014 by james

Note quite there, but very nearly (for the mono camera, at least).  The splitting of the frame clearly means there’s an issue somewhere, but it can’t be too hard to get sorted.

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oaCapture on Raspberry Pi

Posted on August 13, 2014 by james

I’ve finally done the (small amount of) work to get oaCapture working on the Raspberry Pi.  There genuinely wasn’t that much to do.  I was surprised how easily it all worked.  It does struggle to keep up with high frame … Continue reading →

Posted in Astroimaging, Astronomy, Raspberry Pi | Tagged | 3 Comments