After working with Libgphoto2 developer Marcus Meissner, I am happy to announce some small developments for the Pentax K-50. It will now capture and download in Raw+, Raw and JPG formats. Bulb mode and a few other details are still not functioning properly due to a change in the firmware for models after the k-30 but remote trigger and download are working well in command line tests as well as Indilib/ekos in tests with my K-50.
It all started when I found out the hard way that while the K-50 is a great low light camera, it lacks tether support which makes using it for astronomy/AP an exercise in advanced yoga techniques. I went looking for alternative solutions, tinkered with IR remotes and a flashair card and tons of web searching and forum threads before finding that one program (pktriggercord) would do at least basic shuttering, but would not connect to my astronomy software (indi/ekos), while another similar app (gphoto) would do the latter but didn't support my camera.
Both are opensource development, hosted at Github, and GNU licensed, which in my opinion is the last great hope for the world and society as a whole. When I read through source code from both programs I realized that both the Libgphoto/pentax and Pktriggercord libraries were based on the older Pkremote(which also seems to be related somehow to pktether). LibGphoto2, having had fewer testers available for the later Pentax models, as well as being a broad spectrum app, covering many camera brands and models, did not support the later models like Pktriggercord did. ...So I contacted the developers of both programs to see if they would consider getting together and offered myself as a tester for the K-50, and this was the result!
If you have a later model K series you might give Gphoto2 a try, and please drop a line to the guys over at
gPhoto - News and give them some feedback on the results, or just drop comments on this thread and i'll try to forward them. What they really need most is testers. The early attempts that resulted in reported instability and scary lockups were due to the "GUI" in pktriggercord, weren't really that bad as long as you had a way to pull power quickly... and while I was able to reproduce the fluttering error using the PKtriggercord GUI app, I haven't seen any problems like that at all in testing either program when using command line(cli) versions and never had anything even remotely scary happen while working with Gphoto2.
You can find more info and download the software here:
gPhoto - Browse Files at SourceForge.net
You can follow the development of the K-50(and my occasional antics) here:
Support for Pentax K-50 · Issue #31 · gphoto/libgphoto2 · GitHub
If anyone has information to share about later model protocols or the firmware resource tree it would be very helpful in getting better functionality for the later models.