Hi, last night my scope failed to perform a meridian flip and not sure why. Can you please take a look at the log files. The mount is an Astro Physics Mach2.
Here is the SGP log file:
The mount should have flipped around 2:03am 4/24. I have sent logs to Astro Physics and the person to writes their APCC code as well, and their initial take is that ASCOM received no move commands to perform a meridian flip. When I look at your logs it seems to imply that SGP tried to flip but nothing happened.
I saw your post and Ray’s response on the AP group message. I also image with a Mach2 and SGP v4. It is curious that Ray said that the ASCOM log doesn’t show any request to flip and that the SGP log shows a user aborted flip. In my experience, sometimes these issues can be due to too short delay timeout on the mount and the ASCOM driver. You may want to bump those times up and see if that takes care of the problem. I will follow this thread with interest to see if Ken or Jared have more insight.
One thing that you may want to consider is to review the SGP sequence shutdown events. From the log, it doesn’t appear that when SGP aborted the sequence, it parked the mount. The reason your mount kept tracking is because SGP aborted the sequence and disconnected the telescope but I don’t believe it issued a command to park.
Also, you could have another layer of safety by setting the meridian limit in APCC Pro to either stop or park the mount if the limit is reached. By using the flip offset and sending the offset to SGP, SGP can issue a flip command well before the mount arrives at the meridian limit for a given declination. Finallly, if you use horizon limits you have yet another chance to stop the mount from tracking into the pier.
Hi Luca, if you notice the time stamp, the Meridian flip started at 2:03am, it was only aborted by me at 9:30 the next morning when I found it not flipped… no flip and weight was about 60 degrees up in the air. The mach2, because of fixed internal routing has limits on rotation and it was rotated up against the stop and stalled. I do like the fact that the mount just stops at a stall and doesn’t damage anything.
I will look at how to do a timeout delay increase. I’m not sure I’m familiar with that. I do have horizon limits turned on and the last even has a park command when complete, but I didn’t realize I could have a ‘park if error’ kind of operation. I guess there are stil things for me to learn here…. continually in fact. The APCC logs are very confusing, the SGP logs are a little more readable, but still confusing.