SGP has been running great for months. Tonight I got up to check it after a couple of hours. SGP had crashed, it was no longer running. PhD 2 had an error about connecting. The mount was still running at sidereal rate. If I had not checked on it, the scope would have run into the pier at some point. I restarted everything and it is now running just fine again. I will watch it through the meridian flip and then call it a night, as I will be up before it can cause damage if it crashes again.
Here is the link to the log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12TAx41TsEApMcxtaYT6hQ-4xxMO1KtpH/view?usp=sharing
I have never seen this happen. I am hoping it is just a weird glitch.
Best I can tell is that there was an issue with your camera/filterwheel and that caused SGP to have problems. Seeing a handful of TX_TIMEOUT errors coming from the filter wheel.
Looks like an anomaly of sorts but it’s always a good idea to have a backup in case things go wrong. Generally setting limits on your mount is a good idea if it supports that.
I just exchanged emails with Ray G about setting limits with APCC. I will check my connections again this afternoon to make sure nothing worked its way loose.
Just to be clear, SGP completely crashed, it vanished from the screen and was not in the task bar at the bottom of the screen. That seems pretty harsh for a timeout error. Is there anything else I should be looking at? My system is SGP, PhD2, Alnitak Flip Flat and I use the Pegasus focuser control from the Ultimate Power Box V2.
Thanks,
That’s all I can tell from the log. It could have been something completely different…and that’s very likely as it’s a crash and SGP wouldn’t have been able to log it. It may be worth checking your system logs to see if there is anything in there.
I think this is the weakest point with SGPro, i.e. error trapping and protection. I have had this issue (catastrophic crash of SGPro) on two occasions over a nearly 2 year period - both crashes this year though. Both times SGPro shutdown without a trace, did not log any crash details and left the mount tracking. The computer was still up and running - no system errors. I have my mount limits set but it’s not good to have SGPro disappear without a trace however rare an occurrence it is.
I think re-checking your connections and setting your mount limits as you indicated is a good idea.
I don’t know if this is relevant or helpful, but I used to have this about once a night until I upgraded to Ascom 6.5, I haven’t experienced it since. I also updated to the latest ZWO drivers. I was running EQMod, Cartes du Ciel and PHD2 as well as SGPro. I initially thought it was caused by slewing without stopping PHD2 as this seemed to be a common action before it crashed. It usually only happened once a night and seemed ok after restarting everything.
Interesting - I think it’s good that shared your experience. My crashes have been rare (only 2) but I believe one of my crashes was due to the ZWO ASCOM driver misbehaving. This was before the release of ASCOM 6.5 and the new ZWO drivers - so may be resolved by the new ASCOM environment and drivers - I have not updated them yet. The other crash happened after I manipulated some sliders in the histogram panel during image acquisition, I entered a bug report but the problem was unrepeatable so who knows what the real culprit was. I guess my main concern is not so much that a problem occurred but with how SGPro responded to it - a complete shutdown of the program is inelegant to say the least. At worst it can damage equipment. I think this was also the concern of the OP.