cameraunit_asi

cameraunit_asi implements the API traits provided by cameraunit to capture frames from CCD/CMOS based detectors from ZWO. This crate provides wrappers for the ASI Camera SDK C library to access the cameras for image capture and other housekeeping functions in a safe way. Images are obtained as cameraunit::ImageData with extensive metadata.

As is, this Rust driver is intended for use on Linux and macOS platforms.

You can use cameraunit_asi to:

• Access a connected ZWO ASI camera,
• Acquire images from the in supported pixel formats (using the image crate as a backend),
• Save these images to FITS files (requires the cfitsio C library, and uses the fitsio crate) with extensive metadata,
• Alternatively, use the internal image::DynamicImage object to obtain JPEG, PNG, BMP etc.

Pre-requisite

1. Install libusb-1.0-dev on your system.
2. Obtain the ZWO ASI Camera SDK.
3. Extract the ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX.tar.bz2 from the ZIP, and extract its contents (tar -xf ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX.tar.bz2), which will extract the contents to ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX in the current directory.
4. Copy ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX/include/ASICamera2.h to /usr/local/include, or any other directory in your include path.
5. Open README.txt in ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX/lib to determine the applicable system platform. Follow the additional commands to install the udev rules so that the cameras can be accessed without sudo.
6. Copy ASI_linux_mac_SDK_VX.XX/lib/your_target_platform/libASICamera* to a directory in your library path (probably /usr/local/lib), and ensure LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux) or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (macOS) contains the library path.

Usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
cameraunit_asi = "4.1"

and this to your source code:

use cameraunit::{CameraUnit, CameraInfo, ImageData};
use cameraunit_asi::{num_cameras, open_first_camera, ASIImageFormat};

Example

Minimally, the following can open the first available camera, capture a single image, and save it to a FITS file:

let nc = num_cameras();
if nc <= 0 {
    return;
}
let (mut cam, _caminfo) = open_first_camera()
    .map_err(|x| println!("Opening camera: {}", x.to_string()))
    .unwrap();
cam.set_exposure(Duration::from_millis(700))
    .map_err(|x| println!("Setting exposure: {}", x.to_string()))
    .unwrap();
cam.start_exposure()
    .map_err(|x| println!("Start exposure: {}", x.to_string()))
    .unwrap();
while !cam
    .image_ready()
    .map_err(|x| println!("Check exposure: {}", x.to_string()))
    .unwrap()
{
    sleep(Duration::from_secs(1));
}
let img = cam
    .download_image()
    .map_err(|x| println!("Downloading image: {}", x.to_string()))
    .unwrap();
img.save_fits(Path::new("./"), "test", "asicam_test", true, true)
    .unwrap();

Note, that the unused _caminfo object implements the cameraunit::CameraInfo trait and can be cloned and passed around to multiple threads.

For a more complete example, refer to the bundled program.

Installation

The example program can be installed using

$ cargo install cameraunit_asi

and executed using

$ asicamera_capture