SGP Beta 361 Crashes on Continuous Capture in Frame and Focus

Sequence Generator Pro Beta v3.1.0.361 crashes when in frame and focus mode and continuous looping. This happens with both ZWO ASCOM and native drivers. I set Binning to 2x2, exposure time 1 second, Gain 75.

Camera: ZWO ASI 1600MM - Pro (cooled)
Filter wheel: ZWO EFW
Lenovo Thinkpad 11e with latest Windows 10

Mark W

Log attached.

sg_logfile_20191111184810.txt (86.5 KB)

This looks like you were running frame and focus with Image History turned ON right?

Also… when you say crash, do you mean that SGPro just all of a sudden closed and disappeared or did a message pop up about an unhandled exception and then SGPro disappeared?

Ken,

Yes, image history was on.

SGP disappeared with no messages.

Mark

Works fine for me with my ZWO ASI1600mm.Capture

The logs do not have a wealth of information in this particular area… If you have a moment of free time, it would be helpful to know if:

  • Is the crash consistent? Not meaning “does it always crash”?, but rather “does it always crash on the 3rd frame or at the same point”?
  • What happens when you turn Image History off and then run frame and focus?

I’ll try this evening.

Ken,

I installed the new 362 Beta. I ran a crash test

2x2 bin, 1 sec exposure, Image History ON

  1. 6 images, then crash (SGP disappears)
  2. 16 images, then crash
  3. 18 images, then crash
  4. ran without crashing for several minutes, then I stopped. I resumed with 0.5 sec exposures and it did not fail.

Quit SGP, restarted, and ran continuously until I opened the sequence equipment dialog, then it crashed. I could not repeat this.

Ran again with Image History OFF, no problem, switched Image History ON, no problem.

Was running with 1/2 sec exposures, at some point it crashed as I was moving the mouse, but I do not know how many exposures (IH was ON).

So, it may be an intermittent, hard to track issue…

Mark

@mdwetzel

This behavior has all the earmarks of a hardware issue. First suspect USB hub or cables.

Charlie

@mdwetzel

Let’s go through a quick checklist to remove variables and ensure we are only looking at the camera and SGPro.

  • Are you using a USB hub? If yes, let’s bypass it for any tests and connect directly to the computer
  • Do you have sufficient hard disk space on the drive Windows uses for paging (this is usually the C drive)?
  • Have you tried a different USB cable?
  • Are you using the slowest USB speed for data transfer?

When SGPro crashes with no message, it is normally indicative of a “low-level” issue (outside the bounds of .NET). The most common area SGPro executes code outside of .NET is when communicating with device drivers. Because of this, we should also check to see if the camera is crying out for help before crash and SGPro never logs it (due to the crash). Please go ahead and turn on your ASCOM Camera trace logs and we will be able to correlate events.

This is a brand new camera that I just hooked up directly to the PC USB port.

Answers:

  • Are you using a USB hub? If yes, let’s bypass it for any tests and connect directly to the computer
    Direct from USB 3 port on camera. Connected filter wheel to camera USB hub.

  • Do you have sufficient hard disk space on the drive Windows uses for paging (this is usually the C drive)?
    Yes, disk is less than 50% full. It is a SSD 256GB.

  • Have you tried a different USB cable?
    Not yet. I plugged the flat USB cable that came with the camera. I will try a tried and true USB3 cable I have. I know there are reports of ZWO cable reliability issues.

  • Are you using the slowest USB speed for data transfer?
    I an using the default. I did not enable fast download in SGP.

I will also try connecting with SharpCap to see if it is a hardware issue as an alternative test.

Note that I keep Windows 10 up to date.

Mark

One more thing. I want to use the ZWO native driver as it allows me to set both gain and offset in sequences.

Mark

OK. Either way it’s a good data point to know if it still happens when using the ASCOM driver.

Ken,

I unplugged and reconnected the hardware with the same ZWO cables.
I ran a test with SharpCap Pro and it worked without a problem for over an hour.
I then ran a test with SGP and it too ran without a problem for about 20 minutes.
Maybe a connection problem, and much ado about nothing.

I’ll keep testing the camera system and SGP beta.

Thanks,

Mark

I had similar or same problems with stable version of SGP, using two ZWO cameras. In my case, SGP crashed/froze when SGP or ASCOM picked wrong camera drivers. Solution: check that SGP is using correct camera as imaging camera and correct camera as guiding camera. Otherwise restart SGP and verify that correct cameras are used. Regards, Janez