SC4 and Maxim v6.4

Got my first night out with it tonight….total disaster.

Maxim crashes frequently during mount calibration.
Star detection just has not improved at all…..even with a bright star on the sensor it will report no star detected. If I click on the star, and attempt to calibrate the mount, it does not move the mount. Seemingly it will only move the mount during calibration if the program itself picks a star.
capturing frames with a dark frame results in a far, far cleaner image

THERE IS NO DELAY DURING CALIBRATION. I UNCHECKED THAT BOX ON THE AUTOSAVE TAB AND SET A DELAY OF 1 TO 4 SECONDS BUT STILL MAXIM DOES NOT PAUSE.

Waste of money

 

Thanks Colin. I did perform those checks and OS corruption was found here and there. Maxim has not crashed since. I want to try and send you a video of what I am seeing. The SC4/AOX is paired with a Moravian C3-61000 Pro camera/FW on a Planewave L600 mount.
I previously used the SC3/AOX paired to an STX16803 on this same mount and while I got good results the lack of that 0.7x reducer made it very difficult to find suitable guide stars plus there were a myriad of problems with poor star detection and failed drive calibration.

 

Doug/Colin. Planewave were logged into my PC last night and assisted in diagnosing what was happening with the guide star on the AO jumping around making the system unusable at the moment. This video analyses and explains what is happening:



Would you know why the AOX is behaving this way? All corrections to the mount were turned off and an identical short exposure just through the SC4 demonstrated that the SC4 was working fine as is the mount. Seeing was very good.

Martin

 

Hi....you must have an update by now?

 

Any progress on providing software that actually works with the hardware you sell?

 

What is the status? I have an SC4/AOX that I cannot use.

 

and where is it?

 

Not working.
You cannot calibrate the drive with the SC4 binned 2x2. Exact same behaviour as before i.e it picks a spot towards the top left of the guider FOV as the start point of the calibration, so it goes wrong straight away. It does this every time. It has identical behaviour when trying to calibrate the AO when the SC4 is binned 2x2.
So right now you have no alternative to calibrate the AO/Drive binned 1x1, but then of course when you switch to tracking the need is to operate the AO bin 2x2 so that you get decent SNR and therefore bump the mount 2x2, but the calibration was performed at a different bin mode.

and guess what? Still no delay between calibration exposures as far as can tell.

and finally after a couple more hours of trying to get it to work, calibration also fails when the SC4 is binned 1x1 but you can recover it by exercising the AOX...then calibration works and you can see a clear 'X' on the DLImaging AO Control dialogue.

Having done this, the star bounces all over the place.

2 months waited for this update.

 

yes did thast

 

ok...I cannot continue my testing as now Maxim constantly crashes each time I try to take an image with the SC4. Yes, I have done the OS repairs you have mentioned before. I have also uninstalled Maxim DL, the ASCOM drivers and DLImaging and reinstalled. no change.

 

I used a restore point to revert back to v6.4 and get Maxim working again. Then I went through the motions of reinstalling the 6.5 and DLImaging. I was able to calibrate bin 1x1 but as I started to track, the star was just jumping all over the place as before. About an hour later, Maxim crashed as before and on top of that, the new DL driver screws up the ASCOM driver so now I cannot connect to the SC4 in any other software. So once again I am having to uninstall and reinstall so that I can get the SC4 back working as my guider. Honestly guys, this is totally unacceptable.