Last night after about 10 minutes into the first 15 min sub, the cooler on my STT 8300M unexpectedly shut down. I restarted the cooler an it ran for a few minutes, then shut down again. this continued on for a couple of hours after which I ended the session. Initially the cooler temperature was set to -30C, what I have always run the camera at. The ambient temperature was 20C. I reset the cooler temperature to -20C to see if that made any difference. It did not. the cooler still shut down every few minutes. I am running Maxim 5 to capture and control the camera. I use FocusMax for focus. there was nothing different in the session last night from any other session for the last six months. The power to the camera comes from a PowerWerx power supply through a RigRunner distribution system. The AP mount has its own power supply. I have attached the Maxim log to this thread. Any suggestions as to what has gone wrong or what I should do would be appreciated. thanks in advance for the help. Eric
Hi Eric, We're investigating a firmware bug with the STT-8300's cooler, and we're working to resolve it. I suspect you're seeing this issue. Cheers, -Adam
Thanks Adam. It's odd that if there is a bug this is the first time I have seen it in the six months I have used the camera. Also, I am running the camera right now to see if the problem recurs. It's not taking pictures of anything, but is cooling and exposing. Do you have any timetable for a bug fix? Eric
If this is the same bug, you should be able to let the camera sit with the coolers running, doing nothing else (no exposures, etc) and have the coolers shut down. We don't have strict timelines for fixes, because we need to do extensive testing to make sure nothing else in the camera firmware was affected by our changes. It can be anywhere from days to weeks, depending on the tenacity of the bug.
Adam, I have had the camera running for the past two hours cooled to -30C and taking 15 min exposures with the cap on the scope. The cooler has kept working. Hard to understand what happened last night and will it happen again when I go out. Eric
Fingers crossed that was just a fluke, but we're going to keep investigating regardless. Hopefully we'll have a fix out soon, and you won't have to worry about that anymore.