Porting INDI Drivers to Mac and Fixing Fishcamp Starfish on Mac and Linux

[Robert Lancaster]

Hey guys,

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been on a mission to port some of the INDI drivers that were disabled on Mac OS X due to various issues so that they would work on Mac as well as Linux.  About 6 months ago, I had success doing this for the Meade DSI with Jasem’s help, and we had worked on Apogee, QHY, and GPhoto before, so I thought it would be good to attempt to fix some of the others that were disabled.  First, I communicated with SBIG and with their blessing added firmware uploading capability to the driver and made it easier to compile and work with on OS X in INDI.  Then I worked on editing MGEN, FIshcamp, and INDIDuino to get them to compile and hopefully work on OS X.  There was just one problem with that.  I didn’t have any of these 3 cameras/devices to test.  So I asked for testers on indilib.org <http://indilib.org/> and I sought help on Cloudy Nights.  User “Pepe.Lombris” (Stephan) tested the MGEN driver and with the help of “TallFurryMan” (Eric)’s expertise with the current capabilities of the driver, we confirmed that it does in fact work as well as it does on Linux.  It doesn’t work perfectly, but there are not OS X issues.  Then I ordered an Arduino and tested the INDIDuino driver.  It required a couple of changes to get it all working well and there were a couple of issues, but those issues also exist on Linux.  I fixed a few of them.  I think it could use some changes to make it more user friendly and I think I will revisit it, but overall it works very well on OS X now.  Then I found a user on Cloudy Nights named David Illig who was willing to loan me his Fishcamp Starfish so I could test that driver.  I didn’t work on it right away, though because there were a few more drivers that I found I could enable.  

I more recently found that I could enable several other drivers.  The SSAG driver, Radio Sim Driver, Point Grey Firefly FFMV driver, and RTLSDR were able to be enabled and compiled without a whole lot of effort, though the libdc1394 Point Grey dependency gave us issues with including on GIT with the linux build checkers.   I was able to test two of those drivers, the RTLSDR driver and the Radio Sim Driver, and they seem to work well as far as I know.  I should also be able to test the SSAG driver in the near future.  I will be putting up a new request for testers for the others soon.  If you know why any of them were disabled for OS X, please let me know.  They are not yet in the dmg of KStars that is posted online, but I will post a “beta” dmg for the testers to try just like I did before.   Finally, Peter gave me permission to include the ATIK drivers he makes in KStars as well.

Then I worked on the Fishcamp Starfish.   I will summarize that in a different email because it required some work.

So to summarize, I added support in Kstars on Mac by porting, enabling, including, or fixing the Linux drivers for SBIG, MGEN, ATIK, Fishcamp, INDIDuino, SSAG, Radio Sim, RTLSDR, and Point Grey Firefly.

The following are confirmed to be working well on OS X :  SBIG, MGEN, Fishcamp, INDIDuino, Radio Sim, and RTLSDR.

The following ones need to be tested still on OS X:  SSAG and Point Grey Firefly (Possibly ATIK too in order to make sure I included Peter’s driver correctly)

The following ones now should work well/better on Linux but will need testing on Linux: Fishcamp, INDIDuino

This leaves a total of only TWO drivers in Third Party that work on Linux but not on OS X:  Moravian and iNova.  They cannot be ported so easily because they rely on a binary library complied for each OS and processor.  I sent emails to them the other day.  We will see.

Thanks,

Rob
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