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warnerem edited this page Dec 8, 2016 · 5 revisions

There are many ways of controlling the Oculus camera. Simplest is to use the native drivers and GUI from Starlight Xpress. We found that installing the drivers from the disc that came with the cameras and the latest version of the Oculus software (1.5b) worked. http://www.sxccd.com/drivers-downloads

Starlight Xpress also has http://www.sxccd.com/software-development ...

###Manual Operation This requires either direct access or remote access to the control computer and to manually start the software for each run. So current operating procedure is to

  1. log into (remotely or directly) the control computer
  2. create a folder (YYYYMMDD) (folder name is for UT date at end of run, so basically the next day's date)
  3. open the log template, adjust the date, edit info, and save (YYYYMMDD.log) into folder
  4. open a browser and go to Heavens-above.com
  5. copy the ISS information into the log file
  6. save any images of passes into the folder (YYYYMMDD_ISS.png) from that evening or the next morning.
  7. copy IR pass information into log file
  8. save any IR pass images into folder (YYYYMMDD_IR.png) from that evening or next morning.
  9. use the StarlightXpress GUI to set up the camera (delayed start time, number of exposures, length of exposures).
  10. "delete" (reset numbering) any images in autosave folder (technically, they should have been moved already, so not really deleting, but this resets the numbering back to 1)
  11. make sure the box to save the images is checked!
  12. The camera then starts at the given time, saves into the default Autosave directory.
  13. The next day, I log into the control computer, open the software and generate an AVI.
  14. move the movie and images files from the autosave folder into athe previously created folder
  15. repeat

If I had to do this with 6 cameras, this would be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Thus, one of our goals is to automate our cameras.

There is an SDK available from Starlight Xpress. Using the C++ and Python...

Linux based

Visual Basic

Test/Sample Data

http://www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse/obs-data/allsky/ :: data uploaded http://www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse/obs-data/allsky/20151108_MD01_raw.zip :: nice, bright bolide in image1329

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