Meade DSI on Linux - NOT!

News Flash!

There is now a sourceforge project for this.   It was just registered on March 24, 2009, and the snapshots here will be removed at some point since the code in subversion will be updated.  This project is currently development only, but we already have the ability to talk to the camera and query the EEPROM, so check back (but not too often as all three of us on the project are fathers and husbands with all the the responsibilities that entails).

Here is a snapshot of my Meade DSI code for Linux.  It is not well documented an the only part which really works is the "dumper" program which will extract the firmware from an already initialized device.

There are udev scripts and a firmware dump in the system directory which, at least on Fedora 8+, will load the firmware into the device when it is plugged in.  You will need the fxload program to do this which, if my aging memory still serves, disappeared briefly in Fedora 8.  I have Fedora 10 on my laptop and the package is

307 roland> rpm -qif /sbin/fxload 
Name        : fxload                       Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 2002_04_11                        Vendor: Fedora Project
Release     : 7.fc9                         Build Date: Sat 09 Feb 2008 02:31:00 AM EST
Install Date: Wed 21 Jan 2009 12:06:13 PM EST      Build Host: xenbuilder2.fedora.redhat.com
Group       : System Environment/Kernel     Source RPM: fxload-2002_04_11-7.fc9.src.rpm
Size        : 36144                            License: GPLv2+
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Tue 28 Oct 2008 03:16:06 PM EDT, Key ID bf226fcc4ebfc273
Packager    : Fedora Project
URL         : http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/
Summary     : A helper program to download firmware into FX and FX2 EZ-USB devices 

The firmware normally goes under /lib/firmware, although the details of where have varied.  The scripts assume it is simply in /lib/firmware, so it will work if you put it there, but to be consistent with your distribution you may have to tweak things.  Until the driver is really working, I don't see much need to tune this or get an installer than knows the correct place for different distributions....

The only other program that will build at this point is dsipro in the src directory.  All it will do is spit out a few lines showing you a hex dump of parts of the initialization dialog plus the numeric values returned by the DSI for device family, model, version, and revision.  There are some weird things going on I haven't yet figured out with the initialization sequence and it is very sensitive to changes.  I have some comments in the code to indicated command which Meade seems to be sending, but if I include those, the device goes into some mode where it fails to initialize every othe time I run it.  Undoubtably, that's because there are some other commands I need to send that I haven't yet added.

This code is covered under the GNU Public License, version 2 with the exception of the microcode hex dump which belongs to Meade.