AstroCam

||| Current release: 2.7.6, Current SVN/CVS version: - |||

AstroCam is a C based Stepmotor Controlsystem including a Perl and a PHP webinterface (you can choose one of them to use). You can use it for controlling webcams over the Internet or everything else you want to do with a stepmotor. Please send questions, your opinion, feature requests and bug-repots to me: swendzel at ploetner-it dot de.

The first AstroCam version was released in Dec 2001 and was written in C and libTk. After I noticed, that the combination of Tcl/Tk and C code wasn't a good thing, I wrote a CGI webinterface and a Gtk GUI. A few years later, I removed both parts, rewrote AstroCam completely, built an PHP webinterface and changed the communication system between its components to message queues. Again a few years later (2007) I wrote an additional perl based webinterface to give the user the choice between both webinterfaces what lead to AstroCam 2.7.0.

Supported Operating Systems

* OpenBSD i386
* NetBSD i386
* FreeBSD i386
* Linux 2.2/2.4/2.6 x86

Supported Browsers

All browsers with IFrame-support (e.g. Konqueror, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox) should work. Netscape 4.x doesn't work.

Download

You can download the current AstroCam version from Freshmeat and from SourceForge.

Subversion

The SVN repository is available here: http://astrocam.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/astrocam/.

You can also see the latest commits on http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/astrocam.

Help forums and bug reports

You can ask questions in the AstroCam Forums and you can report bugs by sending an eMail to Steffen or by writing a bug report.

There is a picture of my AstroCam available

This is my own AstroCam installed in 2002. The computer is a 333 MHz AMD K6-2 with 64 MB RAM running Slackware Linux 8.0, and a webcam... don't ask me for the vendor of the webcam, I forgot it. The webserver is an Apache-1.x running the oooooold astrocam 0.9-1-1 Beta(?) CGI Webinterface and as a great special: the oooooold (doesn't exist anymore) gameport joystick control of the stepengine.

This picture is from 2007:

FAQ

The AstroCam FAQ.

Q: How does it work and how to install AstroCam?

Take a look at the INSTALL file for installation introductions.

Q: Please tell me more about the requirements of astrocam.

• 1. You need a parallelport on a x86-PC (OS must be Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD).
• 2. You need a control-card (put the card on the parallelport). There are only 2 controller components supported (and only one of them is tested): the SMC-800 Card (tested)and the SMC-1500 Card. I bought my SMC-800 at http://www.conrad.com/.
• 3. You need a stepengine (use any engine you would like to use but take a look at the card requirements from the card documentation before)
• 4. You need a power supply for the smc-card.
• 5. You need to install a webserver + mod_php, a webcam and a webcam software.

Put the motor on the card (or 2 motors for up+down and left+right control); turn on the power-supply and start the computer. Now start astrocam, install an apache webserver with php 4.3 or newer (or an other webserver that supports this PHP version and pray that it will work.

Please take a look at astrocam(7) and the 'INSTALL'-file in .tgz-file.

Q: How to change the design of the Webinterface?

Simply change the 'design' value in your /etc/astrocam.conf. The value has to be one of the .css-files in the astrocam directory on your webserver. You also can create your own design files.

Q: astrocam.php says 'Call to undefined function: msg_get_queue()'!

It seems that your PHP extension-module is not correctly installed in your php.ini file. Please read the 'INSTALL' file from the php-package and the configuration and installation chapter of the php book and make sure that you run PHP Version 4.3.0 or never.

Don't forget to run the ./configure script with '--enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg'. You should add the following lines in your php.ini:

sysvmsg.value=PHP_INI_ALL
sysvmsg.string=PHP_INI_ALL

Q: What is the address of my (second) parallel port?

The primary parallel port normaly has the address 0x378 on x86 PC systems. The second parallel port normaly has the address 0x278. You can take a look into /proc/ioports under Linux to get the correct addresses of your computer.

Here is an example. This hosts has one parallel port at address 0x378:

$ cat /proc/ioports
...
0378-037a : parport0
...

Q: Were does the installer place the docs?

In version 2.6.6 (and before) the installer does not place the docs somewere but they are included in the .tgz file. Since version 2.7.0 the documentation is placed in /usr/share/doc/astrocam.

Q: Is there a way to test astrocam without the webinterface? (v. 2.7.5 or newer)

Yes, run the included script acam_console.pl. This script will move your step engine to left/right and then exits.

Q: acam_console.pl prints this error: Use of uninitialized value in msgsnd at ./acam_console.pl ... -- what went wrong? (v. 2.7.5 or newer)

Start the astrocam service first by running astrocam as root user.