[ANN] LibASICamera - A wrapper for the ZWO ASI camera interface

Specific Domains Astro/Space
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Hey everybody,

I spent the past weeks learning julia and wrote a wrapper for the ZWO ASI camera SDK. You can take a look at the result here:

So far it works under Linux. I have not tested Mac, Win and RasPi so far, because I have none of them. But adding support should be a matter of adjusting the build script. Any help is welcome. E.g. you could help me with:

  1. Implementing the camera as IO object, so that it becomes possible to pipe video directly to compression and to disk

  2. Making the ASICamera a subtype of some more general julia Camera thingy

  3. Overhauling the underlying types; at the moment I create temporary structs, the ccalls write to the NTuples of Cuchars and then I convert everything into “human-readable” structs, which sounds like there should be an easier way (“directly writing into a string”)

In combination with the julia ecosystem it should be possible to implement anything from complete data processing pipeline to autoguiding - so have fun experimenting with it! :blush:

4 Likes
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I’m not currently using any ZWO equipment, but as an astrophotographer I really appreciate your work here. Honestly, what would be really nice is having a way to interface Julia with the ASCOM framework. The more generic Camera type you mention could be implemented with an ASCOM package.

Personally, I’m more interested in and familiar with the image processing side of things, so I’m not much help in terms of hardware. But I hope this area of development can get more attention!