AP Mount Park Issue

[Steve Reilly]

I'm only posting here as Scheduler is running during this testing. I’ve been working on a roof issue in the observatory and have had the Pipe tool connected via ACP to try and see where this is happening. During my testing I came across an on/off again issue I’ve had parking the telescope. I’m using the ASCOM V2 AP driver 5.06.05 with the telescope connected to ACP Expert version 8 Build 4 with Pipe in-between. On rare occasions ACP will send the Park command (Park 4) and it never receives an acknowledgement that it has parked. This hangs ACP as it waits, at least until I see there is an issue and intervene. Today when this happened I started a video to capture the actions. At the time I was using ACP’s Dome Control to open/close the roof (AstroMC). When I hit the Close Button in ACP Dome Control I got the familiar message that the mount must park first and hit OK. Nothing happened. This is when I started the video capture. I went to the Telescope Tab in ACP and hit Park, no response and the Telescope tab seemed locked out but I could open the other tabs, I'm guessing that ACP was waiting fro a response. I opened the driver and expanded the view and hit "park" which now showed the scope parking (it was already in the Park 4 position as the scope had been connected but never tracking this whole testing period). Then the roof started to close, finished and reported several times “Scope is Parked” and “Closing Shutter” from ACP. When I look at the video with the driver open it shows the scope is “Unparked” and doesn’t change until I use the driver to Park the scope. As I said, this is random and only happens occasionally but it does happen leaving the roof in an inoperative state until it receives the park status. Any suggestions would be great. I’ll upload the Pipe log file in hopes it holds some valuable info. I also zipped and uploaded the mp4 video (15MB) file which I hope is OK.

Thanks,