SkyCam module is an abstration layer for Python zwoasi binding.
This library is mainly intended to be run on Raspbery Pi 3. It should work on other similar ARM platforms without any hiccups, but your mileage may vary.
Updating repositories
sudo apt update
Git (optional)
sudo apt -y install git
Python 3
sudo apt -y install python3 pyton3-pip libusb-1.0-0
Modules
sudo pip3 install Pillow zwoasi
You can clone this repository by executing:
git clone https://github.com/filiparag/zwo-skycam.git
or download the archived repository from GitHub website.
If you have a slow SD card or just want to store captured frames in RAM, you can run:
sudo ./ramdisk.sh
This script will create a ramfs partition mounted at /mnt/skycam.
To use this framework, copy both skycam.py and asi.so into the folder of your project. After this, you can import zwo-skycam with from skycam import SkyCam.
At first, the framework has to establish the connetion with a camera. This can be done by calling:
SkyCam.initialize( _library )
function, where you can use _library parameter to indicate different location of the asi.so library.
Use SkyCam.cameras() to see the list of connected cameras. Select one from the list and create its object like following:
my_camera = SkyCam('ZWO ASI120MM')
Camera is now ready to be used. If you want to change any of the settings, you can do it with
configure( _gain, _exposure, _wb_b, _wb_r, _gamma, _brightness, _flip, _bin, _roi, _drange=8, _color, _mode )
Parameter _mode has two options: 'picture' and 'video'. If you need good framerate, run capturing in video mode, otherwise they should work similarly.
For more details about control, read the docstring of the function in skycam.py.
To capture a single frame, use capture( _directory, _file, _format ). If you don't supply any parameters, this method will return the frame as a NumPy array. File name parameter goes through strftime() formatting, so you can easily add time and date.
Default value for _directory is current path and for _file is like in the following example: ZWO-ASI174MM-2017-08-19-15-40-55-UTC-12.
Recording mode can be used to automatically capture sequential frames. Before starting a recording session, you need to configure it using:
recorder.configure( _delay, _keep, _save, _directory, _file, _format )
After this you can use recorder.start() and recorder.stop() to start and stop recording.
Method recorder.buffer_is_empty() returns whether the buffer is empty.
Methods recorder.buffer_next() and recorder.buffer_all() return oldest and all frames in the buffer respectively. Note that recorder.buffer_next() erases retrieved image from the buffer.
To clear the buffer, use recorder.buffer_clear(). Loading frames saved on storage media can be done using recorder.buffer_load().
Detailed explanation for every function can be found in form of docstrings in skycam.py.