Python and Starlight Xpress

[Grant Privett]

Just a simple and quick query, has anyone on here run a Starlight Xpress camera from Python 3 without using ASCOM in any way?

I’m on my third attempt and running out of ideas.

I tried going directly via the dlls I use in my working VB6 code, but that fails after I get the PnP handle.

So, I tried PyUSB v1.0 and that is struggling to recognise the presence of a Starlight camera at all.

I even tried the sxccd code on github, but that appears to have a bug.

Is there anyone who has done this before – as after 6hours of trying to convince some dlls to act sensibly, its getting phenomenally dull…

All ideas very welcome.

EDIT: SxUSB behaviour isn’t a bug it looks like a mismatch between it and Anaconda.

[owen brazell]

Grant you might try asking Martin Meredith who has written the Jocular EAA software in Python and I know it talks directly to some SX cameras and uses Anaconda Python. He might have some ideas. See https://transpy.eu.pythonanywhere.com/jocular

[Grant Privett]

Evening Owen,

Thanks for the headsup. By chance, just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to Martin about his code. I was lending a hand on his attempt to get the Lodestar running happily on Windows. We were having fun trying to get Pyusb and the sxccd code on github working okay. Seemed to work beautifully on Linux but is not always a happy camper on Windows with problems depending on which USB backend was in use on your system. I think he is taking the ASCOM route (though I may be wrong) which I will be curious to see, but would prefer to avoid.

I must admit that after several problems with different approaches, I may just cheat and write a VB6 32bit non-gui  executable that I can talk to via environmental variables and set that running to take pictures, telling it to stop / reconfigure as needed. I can then shell/spawn/subprocess that from nearly any language I choose and will be okay until Microsoft decide its end of life for 32 bit processes in W10 (hopefully at least 10 years hence). Would still rather do it properly, but am having a terrible time getting there….and, frankly, theres things a lot more fun to do.

Clear sky outside … and 99% full Moon. It was ever thus. 

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