ASI ZWO Android Sdk Critical Bugs

artik

Hello,

I'm working on development of OpenLiveStacker open-source app and it supports ASI cameras. It opens huge opportunities.

It is written mostly in C++ and small UI wrapper around it in Java.

There are two critical issues that cause major headache for me as developer:

Official SDK version that is downloadable from web site isn't up to date and does not allow to access the device under Android 10/11 due to different permission model. Replacing libASICamera.so, libusb-1.0.so and libzwo_camera by ones that are in ASICAP APK do work - but they aren't released as part of SDK.

libASICamera.so is linked with libstdc++.so:

$  readelf -ASISDK_ANDROID/CameraSDK/libs/arm64-v8a/libASICamera2.so
...
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libstdc++.so]

Since modern NDK uses libc++ any use of RTTI fail - dynamic_cast or exception handling does not work. If I want to use ASI SDK on android I basically need to limit myself to "C with classes". Thankfully I could do this for specific driver since I load it dynamically and it does not ruin main app. But in reality it is actually disaster...

And final important issues that is actually root cause:

The original SDK is released under MIT license (present in SDK files) but source code isn't provided. If I have had access to the source code I could just rebuild one for the device and situation I need. But without source code I'm greatly limited in abilities to do anything.

Zzzz

Thank you very much for your feedback, we have submitted your question to the development team

artik

Any updates?

Software@ZWO

Hi Artik, please try this one

sdk-for-java-release.zip

7MB

You mentioned that "The original SDK is released under MIT license". Where did you see this information? Our SDK is not an open source software。

Best Regards

artik

Thanks!

I'll check it as soon as I get to my dev machine at home.

You mentioned that "The original SDK is released under MIT license". Where did you see this information? Our SDK is not an open source software

Simple: the content of ASI_linux_mac_SDK_V1.24/license.txt included in Linux/Mac SDK is word by word MIT license.

So I wondered if sources are available as well.

Software@ZWO

artik Hi Artik, Our original intention is that users can freely use our SDK. We never thought about opening our SDK source code.
Best Regards

artik

Hi Artik, please try this one

Ok, I tested and indeed the 1st issue is solved and it works properly thanks! For compilation I used previous header file from Android SDK.

Thanks a lot.

Second issue however wasn't solved. I still can't use any RTTI in the library that is liked to ASI driver - it still links to libstdc++ that is not compatible to latest NDK libc++.

If you can't compile it without using libstdc++ Please make sure that you at least add it to some kind of known issues so at least user can be aware of totally unexpected RTTI failures - it was very hard for me to find what the problem was and create a workaround for it since virtually all my code uses modern C++ and RTTI.

I managed to workaround it in my library by removing any RTTI from the driver wrapped - and since it is dynamically loaded itself I can live with it for now.

Here pointer to the problem

$ readelf -d release/obj/arm64-v8a/libASICamera2.so 

Dynamic section at offset 0x1e2bd0 contains 30 entries:
  Tag        Type                         Name/Value
...
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libstdc++.so]
...

Thanks again,
Artyom (artik) Beilis