I recently encountered a few issues with my QHY5L-ii mono guidecam. I somehow managed to fix them, but am sending this because:
- Perhaps it'll help others
- I have no idea why these things might happen, solutions below are hacks, the problems may happen again, what might I do to prevent this?
- I need to vent
I'm running KStars/Indi/Ekos on the Nov 23rd Raspbian release: Linux raspberrypi 5.4.79-v7l+ #1373 SMP Mon Nov 23 13:27:40 GMT 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux, and running the latest kstars source.
Connection issues:
First off, when I tried to start KStars and connect to Indi, my QHY guide camera was not found. Of course I first suspected bad cables or a bad camera, but, testing those with my backup RPi worked fine. The backup was running older software (but the same Rasbpian release). I noticed that on the 'production RPi' the linux 'lsusb' command did not show the camera, but the 'usb-devices' command did. That gave me the idea that perhaps there was a bad udev rule (given
my recent adventures
with udev). I checked the differences in /lib/udev/rules.d/* between the two machines, and eventually suspecting gpio, I swapped in the older version of '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-rpi.gpio-common.rules and, sure enough (after a boot), the camera was now visible on 'lsusb' and indi now found the camera.
I wish that I could say all was working then, but...
Camera issues:
Though Indi could now connect and communicate with the camera, it failed to take a picture. I tried the '/usr/bin/qhy_ccd_test' program, and it connected, communicated, but couldn't download a picture either. Given the above paragraph, I again suspected something bad in the installation, and found and swapped in the drivers (in /usr/lib/arm/linux/gnueabihf/libqhyccd.so /usr/lib/arm/linux/gnueabihf/libqhyccd.so.20) from the working older setup to the newer setup. Happily, after doing that, things are working fine now.
Not sure what caused this to happen,
Hy