OK, I have had Moravian and SBIG and QSI cameras and never seen anything like this. I have a new QHY ASI2600M and have tried both the native driver (in NINA, the native driver does not work in SGP) and the ASCOM driver (latest, of course), in SGP (both the with the last 3.X and the latest 4.X SGP). The camera simply will not cool with the ASCOM driver. Yes the fan runs, yes is does have DC power and it DOES cool fine with the native driver in NINA.
With the ASCOM driver, the cooler stays at zero percent and the camera stays at ambient, despite me setting the camera to cool to -10 C. It behaves this way in both NINA and SGP if I use the ASCOM driver, it does not matter if I select #1 or #2…
I do also have an uncooled ZWO guide camera plugged in but that is not the one selected in driver setup (the 2600 is selected) and disconnecting the guide camera made no difference in any case.
I have posted this to the ZWO forum but no reply as yet as well as to the NINA forum where no one has replied either.
Try cooling first to 5C, then 0C, then -10C. I saw something similar to this with my ZWO camera. Setting the cool point to something above 0C and letting it stabilize, then cooling further solved the issue.
I thought this was just a ZWO thing…they said something like in order to protect the sensor they built in some kind of two step cooling, so if the first set point was too low it wouldn’t trigger properly. YMMV.
Interesting, will try that. What is interesting is that the native driver in NINA does that automatically, it basically steps down the requested setpoint over a few minutes…
Can now confirm that the above was the issue. If one asks for too large a delta, the cooler will not respond and just stays at zero power. No warning message (there should at least be that, IMHO) and it does not automatically ramp like the native driver does in NINA. Maybe this was somewhere in the instructions but it ought to be built in, otherwise one has to manually cool the camera each time which defeats some of the automation that would otherwise be possible.
Not during cooling, but certainly before you start the sequence, you will see a warning for this.
Cooling the camera over time on camera connect should “accidentally” meet the requirements of this idiosyncrasy right? When SGPro cools over time, it used the “ramp” you speak of.
It does not seem to. I set the time to 5 minutes and it stayed at ambient/zero power. Of course that probably depends on ambient as well as the set point (how far apart the are). If I manually ramped it, it took only about that amount of (total) time to cool to temp. I may try it again with a longer time to be sure.
This idea is supported by the fact that in NINA I get the same behavior with the ASCOM driver but it ramps well with the native driver. I suspect it is the driver that is just not well written.