Hello, My name is Gabriela Molar, I am doing a MSc degree thesis in the Department of Astrophysics of INAOE, Mexico, under the supervision of Drs. Esperanza Carrasco (Department of Astrophysics) and Jorge Pedraza (Department of Electronics). My thesis work, is based on a proposal for the astrophysicists i.e. professional astronomers. The basic idea is to use V4L like the standard method to write drivers for astronomical CCD cameras. We have been able to observe similarities between the interface card of astronomical CCD's, and the cards that are used to watch TV in a PC, such as Zoran and BTTV. Then, we decided to use the same principles that are used to write the drivers for this cards, V4L, but using an astronomical CCD. Also, we have seen that the XawTV program is used like a graphical interface for this applications. We have successfully been able to make our CCD interface card working with V4L. But, the astronomical CCD cameras, require the next functions: - Shutter presence and control - Exposure time - Hardware binning ( which does seem a bit different to image scaling ) We asked Alan Cox and he says that these functions already are been developed for some cameras with V4L, but we haven't found the way to enable them. Alan Cox has suggested us to contact you to see if you can help us to enable these functions for our camera. If we can solve these problems, it will be possible to standardize the use of V4L for astronomical applications. Furthermore as Linux/Unix have been the operating systems for astronomical data reduction, instrument control and programming. The developing of work could be a great contribution to Astronomy. If you need further information, please do contact us, our e-mail address are: Ing. Gabriela Molar : premolar@xxxxxxxxx Dr. Esperanza Carrasco : bec@xxxxxxxxx Dr. Jorge Pedraza : jpch@xxxxxxxxx Thanks in advance. Looking forward to hearing from you, Gabriela.
