[names_r_hard]

I am definitely an astro noob :) LV sampling was just the first idea I thought of. We could also load the last image while the next was being taken, and extract guide points from that (assuming an individual frame has enough distinct bright points... which it might not... you could of course sum a few in software). It's a larger image, but your time constraints shouldn't be tight. That way you're not getting any extra sensor heat. Some CPU heat though, dunno if that would be noticeable.

For networking, this module demonstrates the principles: https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified/...

A simple python server, that accepts image data from the cam, does some processing, sends data back. The network protocol is dirt simple. The config file format for holding network creds, IP addr etc is really very ugly. It was written for convenience of writing the code, not convenience of making the config file.

You would need to find the equivalent networking functions (our jargon is "stubs"). You will likely want help with this, unless you're already familiar with Ghidra or IDA Pro, and have both a 6D and 200D rom dump :) Pop in the discord when you get to that stage, it's too much detail for here.

There's no real list of things people want (well, they want everything...). The issues on the repo will have some good ideas. In the early days of setting that up I tagged a few things as Good First Issue, but gave up since it was just me working on them.

I would say it's more important to find something you're personally motivated by, that way you're more likely to stick with it. It gets a lot easier, but it doesn't have a friendly learning curve.

[fooker]

Does LV sampling work when ..say.. a 120 second image is being captured?

[names_r_hard]

I don't know of a way to do that. I don't think the cam will ever display an image on LV while a capture is in progress. The readout process from the sensor is fundamentally decoupled from the capture. You could probably interleave long exposures with short ones at greatly boosted ISO, and display only the short ones on LV.

I was assuming it would be possible to quite accurately model the drift over time, and adjust the model based on the last image. The model continuously guides the mount, and the lag in updates hopefully wouldn't matter - so you can use saved images, not LV. In fact, we can trigger actions to occur on the in memory image just before writing out.