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Welcome to the indi_pylibcamera wiki!

INDI is an open source software for controlling astronomical equipment. Compared to other solutions INDI runs on Windows, Linux and Raspberry Pi. It is very good supported by KStars and many other software. Especially EKOS (is part of KStars) has many nice features which makes the live of an astronomer easier. With Stellar Mate you can get a Raspberry Pi operating system with all these tools installed and ready to use.

There are very good and inexpensive cameras available for Raspberry Pi. Especially the HQ camera has outstanding performance and is achievable with a small budget. For astro-photography it is a good alternative to high expensive cameras. Arguments for the HQ camera are:

• high sensitivity
• ability for long term exposures
• direct access to raw data
• direct access to hardware controls (like analogue gain)
• low thermal noise
• low fixed pattern noise
• mechanical design makes it easy to connect to your telescope.

The latest Raspberry Pi OS uses the new libcamera software stack. It will support more cameras in a unified way. Unfortunately there was no INDI driver for the new Raspberry Pi libcamera stack. In the meantime some enthusiasts started to work on that (see discussion in Indilib forum). The indi_pylibcamera project uses Python to implement an INDI driver for Raspberry Pi cameras.

Indi_pylibcamera was made for cameras directly connected to the CSI port of Raspberry Pi (using a flat band cable). It is tested with HQ and V1 cameras. Likely it will also work with V2 camera and others directly connected to the CSI port. Most likely it will not work with web cams and other USB connected cameras: although supported by libcamera these cameras do not allow access to raw data and hardware controls.

Detailed installation instructions can be found on page Installation. After installation you can start the INDI server on your Raspberry Pi with:

cd ~/Projects/indi_pylibcamera
indiserver -v ./indi_pylibcamera.py