Camera Image Download Timeout

Sequence Generator Request Archive
1

Hello all,
I fired up the notification system for a trial today and I have to say it will be quite good from what I see
so far.

I did notice one thing though which I feel S G Pro could do with adding. I used the V2 camera simulator,
the ASCOM mount simulator and the Manual rotator while playing with the Frame & Mosaic tool.

Got a pic of B33, framed it, rotated it to 270 deg, downloaded it to the sequencer and Hit 'Run Sequence’
just to see what the notification system emailed me as it was bound to fail for the obvious reasons.

So off it slewed to B33’s RA & Dec, then the wizard fired up, took the imaginary pic with the camera simulator
(I assume to confirm the camera’s rotation as I had plate solving turned off) and then it downloaded the image
…Forever and ever and ever !

Now obviously the simulator has no image to download so the image download stage just sat there and I had
the notification system set to inform of Timeout warnings but none came.

Now you have to ask yourself, in a real imaging session, if there was some problem which stopped your camera
from being able to complete it’s download to the PC for whatever reason, shouldn’t a download process timeout
automatically after ‘X’ time nudge the notification system to report this ???

Maybe with real camera’s it would time out and this is just an issue with the V2 simulator, if not then I’d like to
propose the following.

In the Control panels camera tab (and in profiles) have a box where you can set a pre-determined time where
if each download has not completed by this ‘X’ count then the notification system should send a prompt. Theo-
retically this infinite loop could go on all night and the user would know nothing about it.

Hopefully there is a camera download timeout setting somewhere I have missed but if not then your consideration
of this request might have merit for a future release sometime.

Regards
Paul

2

Hello Paul,
I’m having the the same problem of camera timeout. After try several think to solve the problem I downgrade the version of the SGP to v2.6. Everything is working normal again.

It seems something in SGP v3 is affectign the drivers.
My camera is the Atik 383L+.

I also having some disconnection problems in my mount, maybe the cause was also the SGV v3.

3

@Pontes

If you can reproduce the issue and provide logs, we can take a look.

4

Hi Ken,
I found a log file from some days ago when I had the problem.
Log file

Thanks,

Helber

5

@Pontes

There are a couple things going on here. I don’t think this has anything to do with v2 vs v3 though. What happened is that your guider error went out of tolerance so SGPro restarted that frame. It asked the camera to abort the exposure, it did and then when SGPro was trying to restart the frame, the camera’s state was reported as either “exposing”, “downloading”, “reading”, “writing” or “error”. We did not log the reported state, but the next release will. SGPro waits indefinitely for the camera to report an idle state, but it does not. So… in this case, there is probably a pretty good chance that if we had just gone ahead and started the exposure, the camera would have corrected its state and moved along. Because of this, I have modified the ASCOM camera code such that it will query the camera state and report it, but it will always now continue to try and start the exposure. This will be part of SGPro 3.1