Staff Assigned: Tim AOX Not Responding

I was working with a friend's imaging system last night: STXL-16200, FW8G, AO-X, and although the calibration for the guide chip wnet without issue there was no luck in calibration of the AO. I've used AO units from the original AO, the OA-8 and all have worked as expected. The movement on the AO calibration was at best a few pixels regardless and always failed with either "pixel moved <5 pixels or simply didn't move in one direction at all. Using a bright star 10,000+ ADU and sometimes it would "see" the star although the brightness level was still at least 8,000 or more. I'm told that exercising the axis was successful as you could hear it. I seem to remember, could be wrong, that you could move the individual axis and see the move. Shame the calibration doesn't mimic the normal (non-AO) guider calibration where it draws the "L" so you can actually see what is happening instead of watching the X/Y movement on the left side. At best it seemed to move 1-2 pixels and actually should have failed in both axis.

This was using MaxIm 6.16 and I don't see this as a cable connection as there is only one cable and the guide chip in the filter wheel works just fine. As is the AO-L is not capable of guiding at this point while "normal" guiding seems to work fine. I did notice that when calibration of the guider first, then AO did not populate the guider X/Y speeds in the guider options dialog. It did however after just doing a normal guider calibration (w/o AO). Made no difference when trying to calibrate the AO afterwards still doing the guider then AO.

I'm stuck and at this point the AO isn't working properly. Any suggestions would be great welcomed. The setup has the guider as External Remote (on the filter wheel) and the filter wheel is changing filters properly. At this point it appears to be only the AO that isn't working properly.

Thanks,

Steve

 

This is a follow-up to Steve's post. It's my unit. Initially we thought it was working OK because exercising X&Y at the same time produced a nice "clacking" sound. However, when I exercised the Y-axis alone, the sound was quite muted. I removed the AO-X and exercised it with both MaximDL and CCDOPS so I could watch the glass plate move. The X-axis seems to move OK, but the Y-axis moves only a small amount. I believe that one of the two magnetic actuators on the Y-axis is not functioning. All of the tiny copper wires to the magnetic coils appear to be intact. The resistance measurement on all four coils is about 11 ohms, so I don't think it's a simple connection problem. This is a new unit and I believe it needs to go to Bill for servicing.

 

Hey Doug, it's AOX170301