Support for Orion Starshoot G21 Camera - Link to SDK Inside

[Jasonn Pellegrini]

I believe NINA supports Altair cameras, which they recently came out with the Altair Hypercam 269C and I am 99% sure the Orion G21 is just a clone of it. The capture software is almost identical to the Altair software, pretty much just a different name at the top. Maybe it would be an easy addition since they are from what I can tell the same camera.

Also the camera will randomly disconnect if I use the ascom drivers for the camera, though it was fixed by using the X86 version but seems to sill be an issue!

[Dale Ghent]

Hi Jason,

The Altair and Orion camera are both the same, but they’re OEM’d by ToupTek. ToupTek is so prolific in the OEM camera market that I’ve made a spreadsheet to keep track of it all.

Native support for the StarShoot G21 (and G10, for that matter) is possible but Orion would need to supply the SDK that is specific for their cameras. ToupTek supplies the branded ASCOM and USB drivers for the vendors they OEM for, but those vendors are the only ones who are authorized to distribute that SDK. So there is no way to alter the SDK we already ship in NINA for (and is provided by) Altair, ToupTek, and Omegon cameras and have it work for the Orion one, although they are all essentially the same except in name.

The best path forward on this would be to ask Orion to also furnish the most recent SDK in the downloads section of their website. That way we can take those SDK binaries and incorporate them into an Orion-specific native driver in NINA and have it all be above board in terms of binary file distribution. As for the 64bit ASCOM driver issue, we’ve encountered this problem with ToupTek cameras for other vendors and they had to get an updated driver from ToupTek that corrects the 64bit loading issue. It’s advisable that Orion also do this.

[Jasonn Pellegrini]

Thank you for the information I have copied this to Orion. This is exactly why I was leary about buying the camera from them, lack of 3rd party support. I shall see what they reply with and update here.

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[Jasonn Pellegrini]

I did try to ‘hack’ the inf file for the Altair driver to install for the Orion but didn’t seem to work, was able in get it to install when driver signing removed but the camera defaulted to USB2.0 mode.

[Jasonn Pellegrini]

Well here is a link to the SDK, that orion provided me - http://www.telescope.com/assets/product_files/software/starshootgsdk.20200705.zip

[Bill Richards]

Jasonn,

Did you get this working with your Orion Starshoot G21? I’m considering the Orion Starshoot G26, which appears to be the same as the ZWO ASI2600MC but is $200 less. However, if there will be software support issues and/or NINA doesn’t support that model, I’d rather pay the extra $200 and get teh ZWO model.

[Stefan B]

If someone wants to get this a go, the N.I.N.A. architecture now also offers plugins to implement device drivers.

[Export(typeof(IEquipmentProvider))]
public class SomeCameraProvider: IEquipmentProvider<ICamera> {
  [ImportingConstructor]
  public SomeCameraProvider([whichever importable interfaces you need]) {
    // your ctor impl.
  }

  public IList<ICamera> GetEquipment() {
    // your code to scan for your cameras and return a list of YourCamera with your specific implementation
  }
}

Furthermore you can export a Datatemplate with the key <Fully Qualified Device Type TypeName>_CameraSettingsto add custom settings for your camera.

These interfaces and changes can be accessed with the nuget or a later one: https://www.nuget.org/packages/NINA.Plugin