Error attempting to capture image, Failed to Save Image to Disk errors.
Last night, I captured this below screenshot after the 28th frame, but it was not the first appearance according to my saved image file time stamps, frame 25, frame 26, frame 27 also never got saved as this same error happened too.
How I recover and continue to shoot during the night
Abort the sequence, disconnect and connect to the camera.
Restart the sequence, and everything will be normal (for a while, until it happens again)
Thanks for the report. At this point it is pretty clear that all the issues you are reporting are just symptoms of the same issue (whatever that is). This is also caused by out of memory (just at a different time than the other post).
No. I would certainly release it if I did. SGPro controls so many external processes, I am not even sure if it is a problem that SGPro can fix. For instance, if the driver is leaking, there is nothing SGPro can do about this. In addition to this, the out of memory issue might even be a red herring. Not really sure at this point and, to date, this is the only known report of this issue for QHY so not a lot of data to go on.
I understand you are eager to have a resolution, but:
There is no guarantee this would release any memory at all. Disconnect, connect does not terminate the process and the driver is not obligated to release any memory.
There is no evidence of the driver leaking memory.
If the driver were leaking memory, applying this “fix” to address the symptoms of other software is a slippery slope… and one we cannot afford to maintain. If this were the case, we would need to defer the fix to the driver’s author.
Cbphoto did you try opening the resource monitor and see if SGP memory usage is increasing larger than normal? This can be easily tested indoors. This may just prove the memory leak in the driver but may not be an SGP memory leak.
Entilza, how do I use resource monitor to see if SGP memory usage is increasing larger than normal? Particularly, how do I tell between SGP or driver memory leak from there?
Open Task manager, (right click windows start icon -> task manager )
Then click “open resource monitor” at bottom
A new window will open click the “Memory Tab” see if you can find “Sequence Generator.exe” there.
Record the numbers at the start of a frame/focus loop and watch if the numbers are getting bigger and if they ever get smaller or remain constant. That would be the first thing to check.
For about 2 hour last night I was looping frame and focus exposures with my QHY163M while collimating a scope. I had no issues with downloading those images. There have been very rare times (maybe 3-5x) when an image failed to download and I needed to restart SGP, but those all occurred when the camera was pretty new to me and I was experimenting with the USB download speed in the driver.
Sorry I had to return my compute stick due to an unrelated power adapter issue, so I no longer have this PC…
Will try again with my replacement when it arrives.
Any time it fails to download and hangs when I am having a good nights sleep though would mean the system has failed, and I will wake up an unhappy astrophotographer with little subs captured…
Can you tell us more about how USB speed affected your downloads? What did you do with the USB speed exactly that caused the freeze up?
The camera has not once failed to download an actual light frame image. The only time it has failed to download was taking 1s frame and focus images and usually only when image history was on.
When I first got the QHY163m I set the USB download speed to 0, which is the fastest I believe. The reason was because that’s what I was told to do. Because the camera has a 128mb on board buffer in theory the USB speed shouldn’t matter. But I did get a few hangs while downloading, and also occasionally even when the image would download it would look “weird” (not sure how to explain it but it was obviously not right). I changed the USB speed to 5 and haven’t looked back since.
Also, the newest ascom driver has download speed improvements that were not in the previous driver so make sure you’re on the latest driver.
And for the record I strongly suspect that your compute stick is also part of the problem. I’m just not convinced those little computers are up to the task, but I’m no expert. I have no problems on either my OBS computer (16gb RAM, i7 processor) or my travel Intel NUC (8Ggb RAM, i3 processor).
I haven’t had any issues with cooling (except for one random time???). I should note that I am using a beta DLL that I don’t think is yet in the official driver release.
Thanks for your tip on setting USB download speed to 5. I will try that, as I have also been told before to keep USB speed at 0 in order to minimize amp glow. (sigh, so I need time to take all the bias and dark frames again)
