I’m having what might seem like an old problem that’s been solved for others before, but after trying all the solutions I could find, I’m still not having any luck getting my NiteCrawler 2.5 rotator to rotate properly and center after initially finding its target, and it’s only going in one direction.
Before I get into it, I’d like to share that I do have the rotator set to reverse direction and the limits set to 190/-190.
I’m running ascom 6.6 SP1
Here’s a screenshot of the ascom diagnostics of the rotator
What’s frustrating is the rotator only goes in one direction. It finds its target, takes a picture then recalculates a new sky angle which might be only a few degrees away and rotates past it then goes around a full 360 degrees before finding it. Then it lands on that value and repeats the process continuing to go completely around in the same direction again to the next calculated value. This results in twisted cables and eventually timing out.
It does work briefly after I do a re-calibration of the NiteCrawler by turning it on while pushing the left button, but then at some point it reverts back to its old ways. While it does work at finding its target after a reset, I’m not completely sure if it goes in both directions.
I’ve placed a link to a log file which should have errors that happen at 9 p.m. Now, by this time I’ve been dealing with this problem enough that I was getting impatient and just quitting the routine because it takes forever for the rotator to complete a full 360 and I know what’s going to happen which is it will eventually fail, after wasting 15 minutes. Hopefully there’s enough information to figure out what’s going on.
SGPro has no control over directionality. In the contract that ASCOM provides, it allows an app like SGPro to ask for a position only and then lets the driver itself determine the best direction to get there. In other words, if this is not already a setting in the ASCOM driver, it would need to be a request to Moonlite.
The logs you have posted do not have any specific errors I can see, but I do see the long hang period where you eventually decided to abort while awaiting rotation to complete. Not being present, I don’t have to corresponding visual to correlate with the logs.
Is the rotator just sitting there doing nothing? Is it straining against cables?
It’s not straining or just sitting there, it continues to go around slowly, and does it repeatedly until it does eventually twist up the cables. I think at this point I’ll just uninstall and reinstall all my ascom drivers. Ron at Moonlite suggested I look into the beta driver for the NiteCrawler, which I’ll give a try.
This is a process of elimination, first I tested the NiteCrawler per Ron’s instructions and you’re saying it’s working with SGP, so I’ll try the next thing.
Thank you very much for looking into it, I appreciate your help.
Tom
I’ll certainly keep you posted, however it might not be for a month or so before I’ll be able to try it out again, and the weather of course.
Thanks again,
Tom
I had a similar issue with my NiteCrawler. Mine was one of the very first made and there was a firmware issue that was causing this to happen after the NiteCrawler had been powered on for multiple days (I can’t recall exactly how many). The fix was to power cycle the NiteCrawler and to rehome the rotator and focuser with the NiteCrawler app. I’m not sure if this is your issue or not. But if the problem goes away after a power cycle and rehome and your NiteCrawler is fairly old then this may be the same issue that I was facing.
I ended up sending mine back to Ron to have them upgrade the firmware and I haven’t had an issue since. But I mitigated it for about a year by just turning off the NiteCrawler after imaging.
Jared,
Yes, that’s what I went through as well. I had the firmware version 1.3 and Ron at Moonlite updated it to 1.6. I have done the power cycle routine where it re-homes itself and it does work for a little while, but then it goes back to its old ways. The cable twisting and not being able to center on targets make this frustrating. Many hours get wasted, and I get very few clear nights.
At this point I’m going to update ASCOM to the latest version and reinstall my NiteCrawler drivers. I was running 6.6 SP1 and now I’ll be running version 7. Ron also suggested I try the drivers for running two focusers, which I mentioned before. I’ll first try the reinstall of the original drivers, then if that doesn’t work I’ll try the beta ones. Hopefully this takes care of it. It might be a while before I can test things out, but I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for your insight,
Tom
