generic-camera-asi

generic-camera-asi implements the API traits provided by generic-camera 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 refimage::GenericImageRef with extensive metadata.

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

You can use generic-camera-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]
generic-camera-asi = "<1.0"

and this to your source code:

use generic_camera::{GenCam, GenCamDriver};
use generic_camera_asi::{GenCamAsi, GenCamDriverAsi};
use std::{thread::sleep, time::Duration};

Example

Minimally, the following can open the first available camera and capture a single image:

let mut drv = GenCamDriverAsi;
if drv.available_devices() == 0 {
    return;
}
let mut cam = drv.connect_first_device().expect("Could not connect to camera");
cam.start_exposure().expect("Could not start exposure");
while !cam.image_ready().expect("Could not check if image is ready") {
    sleep(Duration::from_secs(1));
}
let img = cam
          .download_image()
          .expect("Could not download image");

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