I bought two identical camera and filter wheel setups, and the ASCOM driver does show camera 1 and camera 2/ filter wheel 1 and filter wheel 2 in the equipment manager chooser.
However, after selecting the appropriate equipment for each profile, the chosen equipment does not stick, connecting to for example camera 2 when camera 1 was originally selected and saved. Filter wheels experience the same or just disconnect when receiving a command during the sequence.
It is possible to babysit the drivers/equipment, but that’s not why SGP exists. I love our new version, and I understand you guys are busy with it, but can you spend some time to look at what may be the problem? The camera manufacturer has camera and filter wheel software development kits available on their website at:
The multiple instances of camera and filter wheel indicate to this layman that at least the ASCOM driver is recognizing there are two separate equipment sets.
Im not sure. From SGPro’s perspective, it doesnt care that they are the same kind of camera, it sees them as 100% separate and unique. Essentially, what you are describing, is nothing to do with the actual similarity of the cameras, bur rather something like “my profile says I should connect to a QSI, but it always attempts to connect to an ASI instead”. So… we can try to help, but we’d need to see:
logs showing a sequence created from the profile in question (where it connects to the wrong camera)
The actual profile (.sgp file) used to make the sequence
From there, we can see if SGPro is in err or if SGPro is sending the correct commands, but the driver is not interpreting them correctly.
Details on sending equipment profiles to us are here:
I went on the PC and started up SGP in Profile 1 and about 6:00, selected connect all equipment, it connected to the wrong camera. At 6:01, I started up a second instance of SGP in Profile 2, selected connect all equipment, and it “stepped on” the camera connected previously in Profile 1, as evidenced by the cooling fan shutting down. I did not test the filter wheels, but they disconnect, too.
When I took a look at the guide to save Profiles, I realized that I have redirected the save folder to my OneDrive/Documents folder! This entirely could be it, as OneDrive makes my other astronomy program, Astroplanner, behave incorrectly.
I have a link to the Profiles and log files. I renamed them before saving them to my OneDrive to read simpler.
Bob Denny told me that…
“ Classic ASCOM COM doesn’t intrinsically have the ability to host two identical devices of the same type. A few people have worked around this limitation via multiple drivers with different names (e.g. XCamera1 and XCamera2) but which support the same model device. Alpaca has no such limitation, so as devices migrate over to “full” ASCOM Alpaca this limitation will become historical. It’s not practical for the SGP authors to solve.”
This is actually how a lot of MFGs have addressed the issue. ZWO does this as does QHY and a few others. But it would be a change for the MFG or whomever creates their ASCOM driver to handle this.
Player One’s driver talks the talk, though. Upon installing, it shows two instances of both the cameras and the filter wheels. The ASCOM driver then allows me to rename each instance to a custom camera or EFW. The crux of the problem arises, then, when I save each custom instance to a profile, restart Windows, open the equipment profile, and a different filter wheel is selected in Filter Wheels category or upon connecting equipment, they suffer from crossed connections and disconnects. the files linked above would only take 5 minutes to review and verify its an ASCOM driver not sending a unique ID to SGP.
It is a moot point now. I got a 2nd PC, and connected the second camera up to it. Using a remote (wifi even!) server and the Alpaca software, I am able to resolve the driver problem. I am really looking forward to using this unique setup, as it appears that SGP is downloading the images even faster than the 1st camera over USB.