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

[Hans]

Hey Robert,

That is some excellent news and work !

-- Hans

Jasem Mutlaq wrote on 20180623:
> That's awesome progress, Robert!
> 
> KStars on MacOS shall be very soon with the same level of support on Linux!
> 
> Best Regards,
> Jasem Mutlaq
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 9:50 PM, Robert Lancaster <rlancaste at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > 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 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
> >