Hello, First I'll describe the setup, because it is really sort of a kludge I have the following equipment: Telescope: Celestron CPC800 GPS Camera: SBIG ST-7E with CFW-8 Autogider: SBIG ST-237 with 200mm camera lens I have three computers for the observatory, all running windows 7. One each with parallel interface for the Camera and Autoguider, running the SBIG ethernet server over the WiFi, the third computer is connected to the CPC800 by serial and running NexRemote with TCP2COM to redirect the virtual com port from NexRemote to the Wifi. So I can access all of the hardware over my WiFi network with an iMac inside my house running The Sky X Professional with camera add-on. I can communicate with the CPC800, SBIG ST-7E and SBIG ST-237 from the iMac over the WiFi. However when I acquire images with the ST-7E, they appear to have a problem which looks like the frames are interlaced (every other line is about 950 counts) and the others look like they may have the bytes swapped or something. The ST-237 behaves similarly. Could this be a little/big endian thing? I have used the windows computer for the CPC800 to acquire satisfactory images over the WiFi from both cameras using The Sky Professional, so I believe that there is something amiss with the acquisition on the iMac. I also tried CCDOpsLite for the mac the image is the same with The Sky and with CCDOPS, it appears that the SBIG driver on the mac may have an issue. Any help is greatly appreciated. Yes I know, I should get some newer cameras. Someday! Ames
Not sure. It could well be a big-endian little-endian thing. Have you tried using a Windows computer as the remote machine?
Thanks for the idea, yes I have tried Windows to Windows on both wireless and wired networks and it works OK. I'm pretty sure this is a mac driver related issue since images I acquire with CCDOpsLite over the network on the mac look the same as with The Sky X camera add-on over the same network setup they look like there is a sequence or alignment issue at the byte, word, or pixel level. I wanted to try byte-swapping, but did not save images at the time. Will try that when possible. Any chance someone at SBIG could check the driver source code for differences between Mac and Windows to see if there is a difference in endian-ness when an IP based interface is used? Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.
That is your choice, of course. I'd just like to point out that the parallel port cameras have been out of production for 14 years. All of the technology is obsolete; we don't have a working computer old enough to operate a parallel port camera. For that matter we did not receive any of those old cameras as part of the acquisition last year, so even if we were able to work on those drivers, we would not be able to test them. It's not that we are refusing to support those extremely old cameras; we simply cannot.
OK, thanks. I realize the cameras are old. Thank you. Sorry about the snippy comment. I think SBIG makes some good equipment. Been using their cameras on and off since 1998.
