Bug Report with the latest Version of SGP 64bit 4.2.0.1129 under WIndows 10
I noticed tonight very strange behaviour from the native ZWO and ASCOM ASI ZWO drivers for my 071MM-c - no matter the driver selecting once the TEC was engaged for Cooling or Warming the status bar always showed Warming. Worse most of the time it simply ignored all requests to initiate cooling. Even once the camera reached its warm up target termperature it still said warming…
This stops all my plans from running - with the error message you can’t start a plan whilst the camera is warming. From the camera control button I was able to get the camera to cool down to a steady zero celcius - but all the while the monitor window reported the camera was warming - not cooling - and hence the plan wouldn’t execute!
So I just reverted to SGP 64bit v 4.3.0.1118 - cooling works fine - it definitely says cooling when it is selected and it does cool - so possibly a small but critical bug slipped into this latest release maybe?
I can’t reproduce any similar behavior with the latest release. Are you able to remove the camera from the equation (in SGPro) by reproducing this with the ASCOM Simulator camera (in the simulator settings make sure to check all 3 checkboxes about the simulated cooler in order to represent your camera)?
If you’d like to provide a log to show what is happening, we’ll be able to provide additional assistance. Further guidance is here:
I tried the behaviour on my main PC (not the one in my Astro lab) so WIn 11 vs Win 10 - and using a simulator all is fine.
Did you try it on a ZWO camera with cooling?
As you say - it is indeed really wierd behaviour if the code bases are separate and un changed!
I might wait for the next point release and test the bahaviour on that - I want to tweak my focusers backlash tuning first. I have used many versions of SGP - never seen the camera heating and cooling get stuck before. I generally don’t reboot the Astro lab PC (ever) I will see if the behaviour reoccurs afer a reboot (thinking was the stack somewhere corrupted - but if seems unlikely if SGP v3, APT v4.30 and the previous Release Candidate of SGP all operated the cameras cooler correctly.
So park this one until I explore more - I will look for the log - where on my PC is the Log file typically stored?
I don’t have any of our ASI cameras right now, but even if I did, all I could do is verify that it is or isn’t broken (in other words, we have no control over the ASI drivers). That said, ASIs are extremely popular cameras and if we broke cooling for them (which we have before) the forum tends to look different than this (more like an explosion of angry with many reports).
In your position, I would fully uninstall the ASI driver and re-install it, ensure the camera is not attached to a USB hub and replace the USB cable (temporarily). If the issue still persists, we may be able to help you identify the source of the issue with both SGPro logs and ASCOM trace logs for the camera.
With issues like this, SGPro only ever has half of the story because it has no knowledge of the inner workings of the driver. It is, however, possible to get a decent amount of information describing the other half of the story by using ASCOM trace logs. Together, with the corresponding SGPro logs, a fairly complete picture can be drawn. Further guidance on getting ASCOM trace logs is here:
