At last! After intensive testing, refactoring, UI/UX optimizations and the addition of new features, Collimation Circles version 3.0 is finally here.
The most important new feature in this version is the integrated support of video camera streams. When connection to a video stream there are two options:
- Local connection
- Remote connection
Collimation Circles automatically recognises which option is appropriate at any given time.
Prerequisites
Video streaming in new version depends on VideoLAN.LibVLC. On Windows and Mac platforms you are good to go of the box. But for Linux (Raspberry PI OS, Ubuntu) you must install two new packages.
First you need to install libvlc-dev
sudo apt install libvlc-dev
and after that vlc
sudo apt install vlc
Local connection
In this mode, you run Collimation Circles directly on your Linux machine that controls your telescope. In most cases this would be your Raspberry PI.
You just press Start button, video stream pops up and you are good to go. No more messing arround with third party streaming solutions.
Remote connection
In remote connection mode, you are running Collimation Circles on your desktop machine, Windows, Mac, Linux or whatever you are using. You connect to computer that is controlling your telescope remotelly.
In remote connection things are a little more complicated. You must connect to your remote Raspberry PI and start video stream on your own. I will cover that in next chapter.
Starting camera video stream
Camera connected to your telescope is either Raspberry PI ekosystem camera such as HQ camera, Camera module 3 or 2, or third party USB camera or something simmilar.
Raspberry PI camera
If camera connected to your telescope is Raspberry PI camera, then all you need to do is connect to your Raspberry PI machine, open terminal window and run this command:
libcamera-vid -t 0 --inline --nopreview --listen -o tcp://0.0.0.0:8080
This will start video stream from your camera that will be available at your device IP adress and port 8080. Probably something like this: 192.168.1.174:8080. You enter this address in video stream tool like this:
tcp/h264://192.168.1.174:8080
and press Start button. Collimation Circles applicaton should start video streaming window and you are good to go.
Third party camera
With third party cameras things gets little more complicated. But lucky for us, there is wonderful software available, that cower our back. We can use VLC to capture video from camera and convert it to video stream that we can use in Collimation Circles application. VLC is awailable for download here: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
I don't own any USB web camera so I'm not able to help you with that. But if you have basic Linux command line knowledge, it shouldn't be very difucult to figure it out.
You can start here https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/. Please let me know in comments how things worked for you.
Other changes and new features
There was really a lot of work to get to 3.0 version, here is short summary of changes:
- Added Ability to connect to camera stream and display it in background
- Added Log file console support
- Added NLog library for application information logging to file
- Added Option for show keyboard shortcuts in main window
- Added Inclination shortcut
- Added links to patreon web page and social networks
- Added PayPal donation button to About dialog
- Added Requirements check on app startup
- Added Missing translation
- Fixed fatal error when list of shapes is empty and user loads JSON file
- Fixed issue https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/issues/13
- Fixed Segmentation fault on Linux
- Fixed AvaloniaUI NuGet packages Fixed VideoLAN.LibVLC references
- Change Item visibility CheckBox replaced with ToggleButton
- Change About tab moved to is't own dialog
- Change Removed keyboard shortcuts from settings Tab
- Change Simplified settings CheckBox-es
- Change UI/UX optimizations
- Change Upgrade .Net 8
- Change Updated NuGet packages to latest versions
- Change Undock button size and position
- Change Code and performance optimizations
- Change Translation updates
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