Well, it’s been a time coming, but I think 0.0.9 is finally done. I skipped 0.0.8 as I’d made an intermediate release available to a few people with that number.

Major changes for this release include:

• Support for making the control panes dockable, moving them to the right hand side of the display or hiding them altogether, all of which will hopefully make the application a little more usable on smaller displays though I think there’s still work to be done there.
• Full support for the ZWO USB3 cameras with the latest release of their SDK library
• Inclusion of a new release of libusb
• Inclusion of a new release of libuvc. I actually spent some time working on changes for this library to merge some of my enhancements and bugfixes back with those from a number of other people to produce a single set of sources which I’m pleased to say Ken has merged back into his master sources.
• Some support for UVC webcams with YUYV video output streams
• Support for FireWire cameras using IEEE1394/IIDC/DCAM

There are quite a few bugfixes too. There are still some niggles on OSX with the FireWire cameras that I may not have got fully sorted yet. In particular my Mavericks MacBook Pro whines about timeouts with a FireWire camera connected using the Thunderbolt adaptor and I haven’t got to the bottom of that yet.

I haven’t updated the documentation yet. I shall get that done as soon as I can. I think the only major changes are the new options for moving the control panes.

Two releases in a month. The weather must have been bad 🙂

The major additions for this release are support for the Imaging Source USB cameras on OSX and for IEEE1394/IIDC/DCAM cameras on both Linux and OSX. The latter group includes the Point Grey Firefly MV which I have tested (in mono) and also the Point Grey Chameleon and Atik GP which I have not tested. It may well be that all sorts of FireWire cameras also work, but I have none to test and a little fiddling may be required with permissions to get things going. As it is there’s a udev rules file for these cameras on Linux to make the devices readable and writable.

That seems to be one short paragraph that covers an awful lot of work…

Other changes include the addition of controls to enable/disable auto mode for gain and exposure.

My DMK21.618 claims it can do 60fps, but fails miserably with broken frames. That may be a firmware issue, but 30fps seems to work fine.

The same caveats apply for OSX as with the 0.0.6 release. ASI120 cameras may need a firmware change to work, and if you’re building from source it may help to know that I used macports for my build and in particular the qt4-mac, yasm, pkgconfig and tiff packages.

Another month, another new release 😀

There are some bugfixes for handling of cameras in this release. These mainly relate to exposure times, but there are small improvements for all of the supported cameras.

The major changes however are restructuring the code to integrate with GNU autotools for building and support for OSX. I can only test cameras on Mavericks, but I believe the binaries should work on 64-bit Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion. The cameras currently supported are the ZWO ASI range, the QHY5 and the QHY5L-II. The USB2 versions of the ASI120 require a firmware change to work with USB on some (perhaps all) Mac hardware. The firmware and uploader (which I believe only works on Windows at the moment) are available from the ZWO website.

If you’re attempting to build the sources on OSX then it may help to know that I used macports fairly heavily and in particular the packages qt4-mac, yasm, pkgconfig and tiff are required.

Plans for the next release are a little vague at the moment. I’ve had a request to add support for one of the Point Grey cameras and as they do provide an SDK that’s definitely under consideration if I can get my head around it in time. Making the Imaging Source cameras work on OSX is possible (I already have the camera library recognising that a TIS camera is present). I didn’t make a start on filter wheel support for 0.0.6 and I really would like to get somewhere with that for the next release too.

Well, I’ve done as much testing as I can face, if not as much as I’d like to have done. Managing 50-ish virtual machines and a couple of desktops booting into five different OS releases has got the better of me though and I just want this one out of the door now.

The major addition for this release is the majority of the support for the QHY5L-II. I only have the mono version of the camera, so I can’t be certain that colour works.

In addition there’s a new camera controls dialog and the “private” controls for the SPC900 are implemented. The major changes are listed here.

There are now two versions of each of the 32-bit and 64-bit binary releases to handle differences in libraries in the base distributions. Distributions based on Ubuntu 12.04 such as Mint 13 and DistroAstro have their own binaries. Unfortunately it appears for the time being that these releases may not support the SPC900 properly.

The major task for the next release is to port the entire application to OSX and get it working on a MacBook Pro. The current sources build though they don’t work correctly. I’m hopeful that it should be possible to get the QHY5, QHY5L-II and ASI cameras all working on OSX however. I’m also hoping to make a start on support for filter wheels.

A fair few changes this time around, the major one probably being the complete reorganisation of the camera library API to make it far tidier, though there’s still work to do there.

Other changes relate to handling different colour modes, adding TIFF support, support of a much larger number of camera controls (and allowing selection of the ones displayed in the UI), ROI support and much improved support for the QHY5.  The major changes are listed here.

Work on the next release has already begun…

I’ve pretty much completed everything I wanted to do for this next release.  Now I just have some testing left, updating the documentation and building the source and binary distributions.  Once those jobs are done I shall be making a new release.

It’s taken some time, but 0.0.3 beta is now out.  See the downloads section for source and binaries.

If you’re building the source, please read the files in the docs directory first otherwise you’re likely to get nowhere fast.

I have used this application for capturing images of Jupiter, but opportunities for “real life” testing have been few and far between this winter.

It should work with the SPC900 and many, if not all, of the ZWO ASI camera models though I’ve only tested against the ASI120MM and ASI120MC. Likewise the Imaging Source CCD cameras should all work, but I have only tested with some of the DxK21 models. The QHY5 seems to work for me but the documentation is limited and I wouldn’t like to guarantee it. Certainly it is very unreliable on the Raspberry Pi. The Xbox and Lifecam cameras will work, but require a bit of kernel-hackery.

As well as many bugfixes this release includes support for raw colour, demosaicking, capture limits by frame, SER file format output (v2), different reticle designs, improvements in the settings window management and improvements in handling of 16-bit and binned mono.

Downloads of the second alpha release of oaCapture are now available from the downloads page.