Linux Apogee Instruments camera drivers
The Random Factory is pleased to announce the latest release of our
Linux drivers for the Apogee Instruments series of CCD cameras.
Three versions of the package are avilable
- The runtime distribution contains the drivers and GUI, plus libraries
required to run them.
- The source distribution contains the runtime plus all the sources
and tools used to build the drivers.
- The full developers kit on cdrom contains the runtime and source
distributions plus a set of astronomical ,graphics, image processing
and other tools, intended to make it easy to extend the driver and GUI
with capabilities for your specific applications.
The following download are available from the "Linux for Astronomy"
server
Installation
The .tgz runtime should be installed using the following commands
cd /
tar -xvzPf /path-to-archive/apogee-driver-x.y.tgz
/opt/apogee/apogee-post
/opt/apogee/modinstall
Whichever distribution is installed, the camera driver needs to be
prepared (per-user) before use.
Log in with the username you will be using to operate the camera,
the open an xterm and type
/opt/apogee/install
Prompts for the type of camera, and I/O port will appear.
In the event that the .ini file for your camera is not listed,
you may need to obtain the latest version from Apogee.
(alternatively, examine the new .ini file format, and edit your
current .ini file to conform to the same parameter names).
Once the driver is setup, the GUI interface can be started using
the command
~/startapogee
Capabilities
This release of the drivers has the following capabilities
- Support for all ALTA-E and ALTA-U models
- Support for parallel port and PCI, and ISA interface models
- Full-frame, binned, and sub-region readout
- Image read/write to FITS format disk files
- In memory buffering of an arbitrary number of images
- Automatic image display using DS9 image viewer
- Calibration image library construction
- On-the-fly calibration
- Drift-scan mode
- Focus frame readout
- Graphical User Interface to major functions
- Tcl level scripting interface to all aspects of driver
- Tcl level scripting interface to image buffer management
- Tcl level scripting interface to manage FITS images, tables, headers