ACP hangs on initial exposure

[Russell Carroll]

Hi Bob,

On some evenings, we are seeing that one of the telescopes tries to start its first exposure and hangs. What I specifically mean by that is that Maxim has connected to the camera, reads out the sensor temp (in the display window), ACP in the console output will say the following



Using star at mag 3.7. Slew to star
Star slew to autofocus
wait for slew to complete
slew complete
Doing auto-center...
(taking 120 sec. exposure. HAlpha filter, binning = 1)
(Using 8 MHz readout mode)
(starting exposure)

and then nothing happens.

I've attached the screenshot of what is happening. I've also included the log. I tried to abort and run and it got stuck in the same place.

Where might I look to find the bug?

David

I'm experiencing something similar to this and can't find the root cause to fix it. Same camera behavior as you describe, but we do not do guided imaging and we have an L-500 PlaneWave mount. It does not happen every night, and it occurs probably twice a week. It seems to be random, but the camera always hangs up at either the first exposure of a focus seiesr, or the first exposure of an observing series - it can occur any time throughout the evening. The camera never hangs during imaging once it's started, nor on any subsequent image of an image series.

There is nothing in the log file, and it requires Task Manager to kill Scheduler, MaximDL 6.5 and PWI4. I'm not sure what diagnostics to even look for, but I'll try and look next time it crashes.

I've replaced and re-secured cables multiple time without success. It's a head-scratcher!

Russ

[Bob Denny]

That's such an irritating type of problem. The clue is that you have to kill the software chain, meaning the problem is at the USB hardware level locking up everything. I'd check the power supply voltages on the camera and even the CPU. Both checks should be under load. I know this sounds easier said than done! I'm not even sure what those voltages should be :-(