Seems lately I have success or not depending on if the internal guide chip chooses to work on my STL-11002M camera. I know in the morning if I look at my email and see that I have a bunch of failed plans in ACP Expert that the guide chip took another vacation. I've double checked the drivers and all are up to date. At one point I swapped, (via the software) the main/guide chip to test and it worked but evidently just by chance as I did that again later and the same thing happened again. Anyone see this behaviour before and have any insights? Suggestions? Thanks, Steve
Hi Steve. A few ideas for you: 1) Have you turned off the USB Selective Suspend power management on all the devices on your PC? e.g. USB Root hubs, USB hubs, all serial ports, and anything else? If Windows decides to shut devices off, they can upset the USB connections. 2) USBView is a utility that will dump out which USB ports are used by which devices and which hubs. You might want to reconfigure your hardware so each camera goes to its own dedicated USB port. OR, if you are short on ports, make sure that you arent mixing devices of different speeds on the same bus. I have an STL-11000M (not sure what difference is with STL-11002M), but its a slow USB 1.1 device. I can't put a faster camera on the same bus as it. USB Speeds: Low Speed = USB 1.0 = 1.5Mbps for keyboards, mice Full Speed = USB 1.1 = 12Mbps for modest devices like my old STL11k High Speed = USB 2.0 = 480Mbps for newer cameras like STXL series Super Speed = USB 3.0 = 5.0 Gbps for things like hard drives or video devices What I find is if I mix devices of different speeds on the same bus, they become unresponsive. So you might try changing this around. 3) "Took another vacation" made me laugh. Can you explain that - maybe upload an ACP log? Can you watch MaxIm and see it happen, or is that like watching paint dry? Any error logs/messages/screen shots? Version of MaxIm ? If I think of anything else, will let you know.
Thanks for the reply Colin. The camera is a direct connect to the computer and connects via a USB2 active extender cable. The main chip never loses the ability to work, just the guider and the screen stretch values always show between 0-300. The Guider view will be just dark, no pattern, no noise. I have no USB hubs connected to this computer. The normal download for full frames is 26 seconds and this is constant. I may change the USB cable just to eliminate something but I would think if it is the cable then it would affect both main and guide chips but I could easily be wrong. It's been know to happen...... The "vacation" was meant as it was working and then didn't. Of course I haven't seen it start an exposure and work athen later not as these days it's a set and forget system unless something special is happening. The clue in the morning is all the failed plans emails I get from ACP Expert. I seldom watch anything these days unless I see or am alerted to an issue. It's been that reliable and productive. Bob has a heck of a program there and I simply sleep and image, at the same time these days. Thanks Again, Steve
Ok, that's odd. Maybe reach out to Bill Lynch (the SBIG repair guy) and see if he has any ideas. What version of MaxIm are you running ? 6.13 with patch 08 ? I've got ACP installed, and have a problem with my roll off roof not being 100% reliable, so am working on that this weekend (among other things). Once that's fixed, I hope to be able to sleep and image as well ;-)
Email sent to Bill earlier. Running 6.14, the latest. All drivers have been double checked. Just tried CCDOPS and the same results. I'll switch out the active extender cable as I have two spares already run. What roof controller are you using? Steve
LesveDome to garage door opener. Lesvedome is too stupid to have verification that the roof actually did open or close. Simple to fix (just read 2 bits from mag switches that sense end of travel), but the developer didnt seem interested. If I get off my butt one day soon, am going to write my own ascom ROR driver.
Other thing is I hatethat there is no warning - I got surprised one night when ACP auto closed the roof while I was in there. Boltwood rightly said WX was bad, and so wham closed goes the roof. Scared the daylights (nightlights?) out of me. Still have this fear of decapitating guests.
That sounds like a hardware fault with the camera. Intermittent faults can be hard to deal with. Hopefully Bill will be able to help.
