SG Pro with SONY A7S

Could you tell me if Sequence Generator Pro can work with SONY A7S camera?
If so, is that all SG Pro features can be used?

The SONY A7S is increasingly used in astrophotography.

Thanks for your answer.

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No support for the A7S at the moment. Sony doesn’t have a tethered API for it at the moment so that means that capture has to go over the WiFi access point that that A7S creates. Unfortunately this isn’t very good for astrophotography as we generally need to take long exposures over a lot of time and the connection can become unreliable.

So we’re waiting on Sony to come out with a tethered API over USB.

Thanks,
Jared

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Jared,

The whole point of the Sony A7s is that you can shoot 30 or 60 second exposures and gather a huge amount of signal versus noise. So using long exposures isn’t required.

That doesn’t negate the lack of a USB API however, but just saying…

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any news regarding Sony support for SGP? would be so great :slight_smile:
thx Claus

I only take subs with the shutter set to 30s and generally ISO 2400 (don’t use bulb because of the star eater in that mode). If even that could be incorporated i.e. just a shutter trigger and delay, then that would be a big step for us with the A7s, as most of us really struggle if we want to dither as well.

Robert

Sony doesn’t have an API for tethering at the moment. So there’s really nothing we can do here. The exception to this would be if we implemented their web API which would require you to connect your PC to the network that the Sony camera creates (like if you were going to use Play Memories on your phone). This is so un-ideal that we’re not even considering this as an option.

I REALLY want Sony support too. I have an A7S and now an A6000…so believe me, if it were possible (without reverse engineering the USB protocol), we’d have it.

Thanks,
Jared

if wifi connection would be a solution, I would prefer to have this solution instead of no solution.
not being able to use my sony cameras is the reason why i have not yet bought sgp :frowning:

It’s unlikely that we will implement WiFi. The A7S is a great camera (I have one too) but the Sony SDK is pretty awful. There are only 2 applications that I know of that support direct tether with the A7S and they’re both very expensive and not geared towards astrophotography. The wifi connectivity is also pretty bad as you have to be directly connected to the camera, which means no internet connectivity for that PC while shooting. Which is bad if you want to use an online solver. Plus, in my experience, the WiFi was pretty unreliable.

So what you would likely end up with is a pretty horrible experience which would require numerous hours of support from us. And in the end it’s not worth our time to go down that route.

Thanks,
Jared

Well the solution for this would be that there is an ascom driver for dslrs that can use the shutter release cable and picks up the image via standard camera/usb picture protocol … Yes it would limit settings like iso and live view, but all camera’s would be supported, even new ones from day one …

Another possibility is that now that windows will support “Unix” GPhoto gets ported and used like on Ekos/indi …

/Yves

As a bonus, when using GPhoto Library, you can use Nikon FW hack that disables in camera RAW processing. I’m looking at installing Indi/Ekos as I have the D800 …

/Yves

Ken had it right at the beginning of April. ASCOM cameras only, If you want SGP to run with your camera get an ASCOM interface for it. He was joking but I think that would have been the way to go. Even if he then wrote and maintained the ASCOM driver it would separate SGP from the vagaries of the continually varying camera drivers.

As for an ASCOM interface for a generic DSLR, there’s nothing to stop this being done. I suppose that you would have something that will operate the shutter, I’ve seen a serial port line used for that, then find the image file, open it and read the image data. I hadn’t considered that the image file and/or location were standard.

The trick will be avoiding the bloat that will inevitably be demanded.

Indeed a standard ASCOM for DSLR’S …
You use the USB/Serial connection to trigger shutter, and you use the PTP (picture transfer protocol) that most camera’s support to retrieve the image, settings like iso need to be done on camera …

That is how Ekos on Linux is able to interface with so many camera’s, they use the GPhoto library, GP went further then the standard PTP protocol and can control many more things so you don’t need the extra cable to control the shutter, you can even control iso and so …

/Yves

You seem to know far more than me about this, why not have a go.

25 years ago sure, but since I left school I did not write a single line of code anymore. So yeah I have the 10 000 feet overview but actually implementing it … not for me anymore … frustrating as I did designed an eprom board, flashed DOS on it and wrote a BIOS device driver to boot diskless …

/Yves

I can get pictures from the A7s tethered using USB and gphoto2, why can’t it work with your software?