Staff Assigned: Adam Robichaud OSX 10.10.1 breaks SBIG Universal Drivers?

I'd be happy to give the driver a try. iMac Retina with old ST-8XME/AO-8/CFW8 using Equinox Image. I'm a long time Mac and iOS developer.

 

Any update on an official release. Some vendors are waiting for the new OS X driver for El Capitan as well as the signed Frameworks to update their product...

 

Hi folks, I am trying to connect an old SBIG ST-7E with my laptop (I bought a 9-pin to USB converter to connect it) but I realized the driver problem on El Capitan. Any news on that front?
Every piece of help would be greatly apreciated.
Thanks,
nino

 

Any update on the new drivers/Frameworks ?

 

I found an old windows laptop with Win XP and the serial port on it that I may use. Any other option to revive this camera?
Thanks.

 

Any update as now OS X 10.12 (Sierra) is out and we still don't have properly signe drivers ? (this thread was started in Dec. 2014 ... . . . )

Rodolphe

 

I am still using the same SBIG driver from before and it works, but of course I had to turn off SIP systemwide to get it to work. It would be very nice to have signed drivers/frameworks so I don't have to do that when I want to connect my SBIG to my Mac.

I have also been working for the last several months with INDI, a Mac/Linux version of Ascom, and KStars/Ekos, an excellent Linux Planetarium and Astrophotography Suite. This spring, I got INDI working on a Raspberry Pi, which can serve up all my astrophotography devices wirelessly and I can connect to them from my Laptop. This summer, I worked out a number of issues and am now running KStars/Ekos on the Pi so that it controls the whole astrophotography session and have been using VNC from my mac to connect. I have been working this month to get the software working on OS X natively because I don't always want to do astrophotography using a VNC client. This past week I had a lot of success and I made some coding contributions to the project. I have posted my instructions in the forums there if anybody is interested.

In that vein, it would be very nice if the Linux SBIG drivers could be compiled to work on an arm-64 machine. They have been working great on an arm-hf (32 bit) Raspberry Pi 3, but it would be extremely useful if I could use my ODroid-C2 for this as well.

 

Thanks for the update and for your work on this. I'm still using Yosemite because of this issue. There are quite a few of us looking forward to the new drivers.

 

Adam,

Thank you for making the new framework available. I tested it tonight with my ST-8300M using Mac OS 10.11.6, late 2008 Aluminum Macbook with 8 Gb of RAM, and unfortunately, it did not work. What seems to be failing is the upload of firmware to the camera right after connection to the computer: The status light does not flicker and then come on solid. Fortunately, I was able to fall back to the old framework, disable SIP, and all is well again. I believe that unlike the newer STF models, older cameras like mine require the aforementioned firmware upload upon connection. Not sure what to say, but thank you for trying.

--Mike

 

Just jumping in here ... been running my P-MX/SBIG ST2000xm/FeatherTouch Focuser system software under Windows/ASCOM since 2009, and its always just worked (probably selective memory, but lets go with it). Just recently I started the move to a pure-Mac platform - a 2014 iMac running OSX 10.12.1 (Sierra) - and ran smack into this issue.

An extended search found, and I followed, the instructions on the Cloudy Night forum regarding the "csrutil enable --without kext" hack. That brought the camera back from the dark and allowed my TSX-Mac access to it, including loading the firmware at connection without a plug-unplug-plug dance. Great workaround !! as long as Apple's updates don't break it. But we definitely need something less MacGuyver-ed.

Like everybody else who makes USB-serial connected hardware, I know you guys are struggling to get this issue fixed as fast as you can. But, as its been almost 8 weeks since Adam's last post: are there any further developments you can provide us? Pretty please?

 

Another few months have past and still nothing. At this point I think I'll resale my camera and move to a different vendor as OS X support his now effectively defunct for SBIG camera (actually since Yosemite as seen in this thread http://www.diffractionlimited.com/forum/threads/st-8300c-driver-and-os-x-yosemite.68/ from October 2014.). No updated drivers, no signed drivers available for all ... time to move on.

 

That's a good, point, I think the last post about the framework from Adam on Oct. 5th was that there was a minor glitch and that an update was coming shortly, which was now about 3 months ago. I would like to see this driver properly signed and updated so that it works well under OS X without requiring the SIP workaround.

That being said, rpineau, do not despair! I have been doing quite a bit of astrophotography on my Mac using my SBIG camera. My SBIG as well as all of my other astrophotography gear (SBIG 8300M, Losmandy G11, ZWO ASI120, and Moonlite Focuser) is attached to a Raspberry Pi that is attached to my telescope with velcro. The Raspberry Pi is running an INDIServer and serving up all of these devices wirelessly to my Mac which is inside the house (which is nice and warm unlike my telescope right now). On my Mac, I am running KStars and Ekos as the INDI Client and running all of my equipment from inside the house. Since the SBIG is being run from the INDIServer, the Mac SBIG driver is not the one I am using, it is the 32 bit ARM Linux driver on the Raspberry Pi. I am of course using the INDI SBIG driver on both, which is built on that driver.

I still would like to get a 64bit compiled version of the Linux ARM driver as well, so that I could use my ODroid C2 as well as my raspberry pi, but I cannot complain because earlier in this thread Adam told me to post a ticket in a separate thread and I have not done that yet. I have just been using the Raspberry Pi. One day, the PI will have a 64-bit kernel and at that point a 64-bit compiled ARM Linux driver will be more urgent.

 

@ Adam, I finally just posted that separate request for the ARM 64 Linux driver you requested. This reminded me to do it.