INDI Library – Tips & Tricks

To manage my astronomy devices I’m using the INDI Library that is an open source, cross platform protocol designed to support control, automation, data acquisition, and exchange among hardware devices and software frontends. INDI stands for the Instrument-Neutral-Distributed-Interface. It supports a wide range of devices and can be used with many different clients.

INDIlib is not that difficult to handle but I’ve decided to create this page, just to list some tips and tricks based on my experience to run my devices. You can find also a lot of information on the active forum of INDIlib.

My material is composed of: Canon DSL3 300D, Philips TouCam Pro 2, ZWO ASI 120MM and a Losmandy GM8 Gemini2 mount.

• Command to launch Indi for this material: indiserver -v indi_gphoto_ccd indi_v4l2_ccd indi_asi_ccd indi_lx200gemini

The driver indi_gphoto_ccd is used to manage the Canon 300D and no issues were identified.

For the webcam (indi_v4l2_ccd), if you’re running Indi on a laptop, you will probably have a built-in camera on your computer. Be careful to set (in the options tab) your astro-webcam on /dev/video1 otherwise by default it will use the webcam of your laptop (on /dev/video0).

With the ASI 120MM (indi_asi_ccd), I was able to connect the camera but I had an error (ASIGetExpStatus failed (0). Restarting exposure…) while trying to capture an image. I’ve solved this issue by updating the firmware of the camera using the ASI Cameras Firmware Upgrade Tool.

Finally, when trying to connect the mount (indi_lx200gemini) to the laptop, by default Indi is looking on /dev/ttyUSB0 port. However, the mount is connected on /dev/ttyACM0. This can be changed also in the options tab of the Gemini driver.

One last thing, if you’re using the debug mod for a driver, then logs are located under ~/.indi/