tested out the ZWO Native driver and it leaves some to be desired. You cannot set the gain the same way you do with the ASCOM driver (the tool icon does nothing when you click it) but you can set the gain on the event level or equipment profile level.
In testing with the ZWO 183MM Pro, the amp glow in the corners returned with the Native Driver, so SGP must be using an older version of the SDK for ZWO cameras. Likewise, the reported median ADU for a 5 min 53 gain dark was 176, which is not accurate at all. I was able to cool the camera inside of my house to -20 via the native driver at 78% power on the TEC, which I have never been able to do with ASCOM, oddly enough.
I reconnected the camera via ASCOM, and the camera worked normally. I was able to cool to -20 again, although the cooler was at 99%. The amp glow no longer persisted in the corners, as expected, and the median ADU of the 5 min gain 53 dark was 688.
I completely agree. It’s essentially in a state where people can use it and complain and we can figure out what needs to be done to make it better. I’m certainly not a competent CMOS imager so I need some assistance in figuring out what controls do and do not need exposed.
So assuming that for now you have to live within the existing ui constraints of SGP…what needs to change?
I’ll see about updating the drivers. What is there is probably some months old.
I assume the fix for the amp glow for various ZWO camera will be solved by the SDK update. Likely that the SDK in use may be old enough that my camera is also not properly supported, which would explain the odd ADU value I saw for the dark frames I tested.
In terms of interacting with the camera, is there something that can be done to make the wrench icon (which is usually used to configure the camera) do something? If not, that is fine it is just not intuitive that a lit up icon would do nothing when clicked.
Setting the gain on the profile or event level is totally fine. Once the SDK update is done, I can easily test again to see if I am getting normal results. I would suspect that the 1600 camera would be better to test in this scenario, as it is not as new as this 183MM Pro is.
Yes. Just need to know what you’d need access to. Offset comes to mind. I’m not sure what else. It should already be dimmed as there are no settings currently. I’ll double check that.
Gain setting is really all anyone needs to set via the tool icon, as the camera is supposed to automatically set the offset for you. Now, this may be a feature of using ASCOM (Sam would need to confirm if SDK access still sets the offset for you), however just the gain needs to be set via the wrench icon. If you can get at the presets they have built into their driver, that would be good as well, as the camera has some presets they expose for things like highest dynamic range, unity, etc.