Camera v1.3 not detected

I have been testing the microscope mostly with the Rasp cam V2,however a day before I tried to switch to the older one i.e. v1.3 cam. Its not detecting and am seeing network error. When I tried to capture pic in terminal, it was successful.

Hi @Muralig1984 that’s probably a problem with our camera control code assuming you have a v2; unfortunately we don’t have any old camera modules set up to test with, we’ve entirely switched to v2 as v1.3 has reached its end-of-life although they are often still available from resellers, often very cheaply.

If you are able to debug where in the Python code it is failing (e.g. connecting to your microscope via SSH and using the output of ofm serve, or looking in ofm log) it might be possible to fix - but as we can’t test the fix, I should really just be reccomending everyone uses the better-supported v2 camera. The documentation might not be clear on that point - if you can point me at anywhere we suggest a v1.3 is still OK, I should probably just update the documentation to say it’s no longer supported.

Yes, at the moment the OFM instructions recommend to use v2 but also say that v1 still works so I’ve added an issue to clarify that we only support v2.

Delta Stage docs only specify the v2.

Thanks @samuelmcdermott I’m hoping to do a microscope patch release with documentation fixes and will add that in.

Pi Cams v1.3 are currently available for very cheap. May be it is worth adding the parameters to the software to support them properly. That would allow having multiple optics to swap quickly without being too expensive. I have not looked into what that would entail, though.

Unfortunately adding other cameras requires a big change in the back end of the software. However there does need to be a big change in the camera implementation to catch up with the most recent version of the Raspberry Pi operating system. This is not yet done, but it should allow it to support more cameras (New autofocus camera modules! - Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3).

The Pi Cam 1.3 might actually be a good stepping stone for reworking the software infrastructure as it is cheap and works with the existing hardware. Any other camera would also need a new optics module designed in OpenSCAD.

I’ve got a minimal working example of what I hope will become v3 of the software - and I can confirm the camera code currently works with Raspberry Pi camera module v2 or the HQ one, which are the two I have in my lab. I’m actually not sure I have a v1 to test against, but there’s some code here:

Unfortunately I have not yet added instructions on how to run it, so if you’d be keen to do some testing, shout and I’ll try to add them… it’s very much work in progress though, so please treat it gently!