Recently Fixed Camera Not Working

Hi,

Much frustration here.

After spending a whole bunch of money, and a whole bunch of time, sending my camera (STX-16803), filter wheel and AO-X in for service, I have received it back, and it seems to be malfunctioning.

Specifically, two things are happening:

1. When set up for "SBIG Universal" (i.e., not using the AO, so I can calibrate the guider), it tells me "Error opening camera in dual chip mode Establish Link Failed : 1." The same thing happens in Maxim 6 or Maxim 7, no matter what I try.

2. When set up for "SBIG w/AO" for the camera, and "SBIG AO+FW" for the filter wheel (changing nothing else), it will connect (although it's a very slow process, taking about 30 seconds; the computer, as you may remember, is a very fast computer). But, when I take an image with "camera 2," it does one of two things: (i) it takes the image, shows it on screen, but also hangs, and won't do anything more (showing on the AO box that it's still exposing, forever, so I have to kill Maxim in Task Manager to get it to do anything; I have uploaded a screen shot of this happening, called "Endless.jpg"); (ii) it takes the image, which looks fine, but then downloads another "image," which is just some sort of interference pattern, and that camera reads that second, nonsense, image (I have uploaded a screen shot of this happening, called "Two.jpg"). (i) above happens in both Maxim 6 and Maxim 7. (ii) above only happens in Maxim 6; in Maxim 7, the (ii) equivalent is it takes a blank image, showing no stars when I know that there are lots of stars.

Last night, after doing this nonsense for an hour or so, it started behaving itself (after I power-cycled the camera many times, and re-booted Maxim many times), and took images. Tonight, the guide chip simply won't take proper images.

The good news is that I no longer have elongated stars.

 

I have asked the guys at SRO to check the cables. I do not understand the suggestion to "connect to the STX with no guider connected or configured," since I thought that the guider did not have separate wires.

 

The equipment is 800 miles away from me, and I have only seen it once (years ago); so I'm not familiar with the configuration.

Yes, it's the STX guider you just fixed. Is the guider connected to the camera with its own HDMI cable (separate from how the camera connects to the computer)?

 

They reseated the HDMI cable, and even wrapped it to the wire next to it, to remove any play.

The camera connects just fine now, but the "camera 2" imaging still has issues. The error message regarding "dual chip" did not crop up, on either Maxim 6 or Maxim 7. Using "SBIG Universal" (no AO), it doesn't throw an error message, but I'm not convinced it's taking an image either, since it's daylight and the image it shows is black (even adjust the screen stretch all the way). The result with "SBIG w/AO" is still that it hangs, although it once threw the error message "error retrieving image array size."

Is the HDMI cable something proprietary to you guys, or could we try another, known-good HDMI cable?

 

Thanks, Doug! I'll buy a good HDMI cable to replace the one that's there.

UPDATE:

I actually imaged successfully last night, the first time in several months! Tight round stars and all! I used Maxim 6, since I cannot get Maxim 7 to do much of anything, but Maxim 6 is working fine (except as noted below).

The bad news is that I still can't get the guide chip to take images in "SBIG w/AO" mode; still either hangs or returns the odd combination of two images, one correct and one an interference pattern. So I imaged guiding with the mount (which worked very well).

As noted above, I'll get a new, high quality HDMI cable to replace the one I have, since the intermittent nature of the problems indicates that the cable may be a problem.

 

I can attest to the fact that a cheap HDMI cable will NOT work properly.

Also, there are tension pins in the HDMI socket that can become loose and not keep enough tension on the cable and not make a good connection. I took a very small straight screwdriver and very carefully bent these out for a much better and tighter connection.

HDMI was a very poor choice for a connector, I know this was before DL bought SBIG, but someone should be scolded for this choice!

 

Update:

After an immense amount of time spent examining everything (while I wait for the new HDMI cable to arrive, and while I wait for the moon to go away), I seem to have the system working with Maxim 6, including the AO.

Maxim 7 is close, but when it is starting up the AO, the AO guide box doesn't detect the guide star, even though it's a mag 7 star right in the middle of the chip (in the image on the main Maxim box). Any ideas on what I might have missed? All the settings seem to be the same for both Maxim 6 and Maxim 7.

 

I'm not clear what you're asking for, and/or how to do it.

The main Maxim window shows the guide chip, with a big, bright star near the center. but the "SBIG AO control" window shows nothing. What exactly do you want me to do, and how do I do that?

Thanks.

 

Ok. I'll wait until tonight, to show what it does in real imaging time. I'll start a remote run, and (assuming it does the same thing, which may be a rash assumption given how variable things are) then save the relevant image(s).

 

The new, high-speed, fairly short, HDMI cable arrived today, and was installed.

The good news is that I can force Maxim 7 to work with the AO, but I am suspecting some sort of incompatibility between ACP and Maxim 7.

With "minimum guide interval" set at 0.02 in ACP, and "SNR Threshold" set at 15 in the SBIG AO Control panel (both Maxim 6 and Maxim 7), Maxim 6 guides the AO at 8.3 Hz, with a SNR of a bit over 20 (guide exposure of 0.02 seconds). It works very well.

On the same target, same ACP plan (so, yes, exactly the same coordinates and mag 7 guide star in the same place on the chip), Maxim 7 cannot pick up the guide star in the SBIG AO Control panel (shows up fine on the main Maxim panel), working with 0.02 second guide exposures. Same guide star on which Maxim 6 is very happy to guide quite successfully with a 0.02 second exposure. If I change the setting in ACP so that the minimum guide interval is 0.05 sec, Maxim 7 sometimes will spick up the star in the SBIG AO Control panel; sometimes it won't (now with 0.05 second guide exposures). If I change it to 0.07 seconds, Maxim 7 will pick up the guide star just fine, and guides just fine (with 0.07 second guide exposures). All with the same SNR threshold setting in both Maxim 6 and Maxim 7.

It's not a major issue at the moment, obviously, since I can use Maxim 6 for the time being, and that seems to be functioning fine. But it's a problem I would like to solve.

FWIW, I have attached a .fit file of the guide chip off the Maxim 7 problem, and a photo of the SBIG AO Control panel while the problem is happening