oaCapture 0.8.0 release

Second release in a month! (By the skin of my teeth 🙂

That does mean there aren’t too many new features in this one. The main changes are partial support for the Celestron Neximage cameras and potentially Imaging Source USB2 CMOS cameras, support for the cooler controls in ZWO ASI cameras and support for Point Grey GigE cameras. There are also bugfixes for the ARM7 build, Point Grey IIDC cameras, the limit selection box not functioning intuitively on OSX and a few others.

I have tested the Neximage Burst C on Linux and OSX. On Linux it appears to work fine. On my (non-unibody) Mac Mini it appears to work fine on both Snow Leopard and Yosemite. However, on my 13″ 2013 Macbook Pro it appears to lock up the USB subsystem completely which requires a reboot to restore it regardless of which OSX release is used. I thought this was a hardware compatibility problem, but booting the MBP into Linux allows the camera to work happily, so it looks like some strange issue with OSX on my MBP. There do seem to be a number of reports of people experiencing hangs with USB devices on the 2013 13″ MBP, so it may just be my model. I would suggest however that if you’re going to give this camera a try on OSX, make sure all other applications are closed first and be prepared to have to turn off the power to recover the machine if it hangs.

The Burst M is untested but I believe it should work as well as the Burst C. The Neximage 5 may work with restricted functionality or may not work at all. Other Neximage cameras are not supported by this release.

The Imaging Source USB2 CMOS cameras (DFK22, DFK42, DFK72 and their mono counterparts) may work as the Neximage cameras are based on some of these models, with the same caveats for OSX.

ZWO cooler support is obviously not properly tested as the production cameras are not yet available.

At the moment Point Grey GigE cameras are supported using their Flycapture2 SDK. I can’t distribute this, so anyone wishing to use it will need to download and install the latest version themselves. You’ll then either need to build from source (the build system will find the libraries and use them if they’re present) or I can perhaps make binaries available that are linked against the necessary shared objects. I believe mono cameras should work, but colour cameras are not tested.

Feedback on which of these cameras work or don’t and particularly which Apple hardware the Celestron/Imaging Source cameras work on will be gratefully received.

Downloads from the page linked above.