GooE what does this error message mean and what can I do to troubleshoot it?
I think it is a bug (which ASIAIR will eventually call it "optimization," as usual -- they seldom admit that anything is a bug, while in the Silicon Valley, errors like that would definitely be called algorithmic bugs). We need to send Grace Hopper (posthumously) over there :-).
Someone else posted a log on the ASIAIR Facebook page that showed the star sizes vs EAF position. It looked like a perfectly good V-curve to me, with starting star size above 10 and ending star size also above 10, with more than 5 steps, with a distinct minima in between. That should be good enough to produce a hyperbolic match to find the actual focus point. But ASIAIR returned an error that the EAF range was under 900 (a number it picked up out of nowhere!).
I don't use Facebook, so I never got a chance to reply saying that his/her numbers were perfectly fine.
His/her EAF scale is a little narrower than typical focusers (I think the poster said he/she used a RASA) and ASIAIR may be making a sanity check and decided that the range is less than 900 and is too small -- it should not do that, given the shape of the curve is perfectly good. ASIAIR, as usual, is making some terribly naive assumptions on how focusers behave. There is a factor of more than 2 in focuser scale between the EAF mounted directly on my FSQ-85 and the focuser scale of the EAF that I used to belt drive an Askar ACL200. It should never have used the absolute range, but just look at the shape of the V curve.
If the auto focus occurred while you were in AutoRun, should find the autofocus sequence in your Autorun log in either the Disk or UDisk volume on ASIAIR's Samba server. If you find it, post the autofocus sequence here; I can try to run your numbers on my own program to compute the V curve and show you the results.
I have been using the average star HFD from the ASIAIR "Detect Stars" tool to determine my own focus since the "auto-focus" routine in ASIAIR more often than not produces a focal point that is outside of the critical focal region. The stars are bloated sometimes by 50% for no good reason when using ASIAIR's auto focus tool.
Chen
