Getting INDI to Work

INDI 0.4 has several problems that prevent the SBIG driver from working. These are the result of some last-minute changes in the SBIG code that were intended to standardize the driver to use cfitsio for all FITS file handling. Unfortunately, the changes were incomplete resulting in part of the code using cfitsio and part of it trying to manipulate the data directly. In some cases, the data was transformed from native format to FITS format twice resulting in just plain broken data.

This problem has been fixed in subversion and will certainly be part of the 0.5 release. Meanwhile, download from sourceforge and build. The subversion copy also detects whether or not you already have libsbigudrv.so and cfitsio installed and, if so, skips building cfitsio and skips installing libsbigudrv.so.

I can happily attest that the latest version works wonderfully with my ST7 for image acquisition and, when run from withing XEphem, I had no difficulty slewing my Gemini GM-8 to targets, acquiring images, and doing plate reductions.  There's still some work to be done with autoguiding (or maybe I just haven't figured out how to do it yet), but the system is at least marginally workable.

Caveat Installer

I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why the SBIG driver presented itself to XEphem via INDI but was completely unusable. It turned out that I had no less than three installations of INDI on my system and the most recent version was not the one in the front of my path, so I was using an older version. I konw, you would never make such a stupid mistake....