Downloading Guide Image

sreilly24590

Testing and setting up my new ASI2600MC Duo I can take images fine with the main chip and I can take a guide image, pick my guide star, calibrate, but not guide. This is done in MaxImDl and using the ASCOM driver for both cameras and both are identified properly:

Camera1 ASI2600 main chip, Camera2 ASI220 guide chip

Tech@ZWO

sreilly24590
Did you choose expose and click start?

sreilly24590

Yes, my normal procedure is to:

expose
Pick start
3 Calibrate if needed
After successful calibration hit Track

What I was seeing was a successful calibration "L shaped". then I would choose the star, and then choose Track and Start. I've been doing this for over 20 years with dual chip cameras.

After a successful calibration and hitting Track it would take an image but never download. Any attempts after that failed to see any action.

The camera is setup in ASCOM as ASI Camera1 and ASI Camera2 and I use the latest version of MaxImDl. (6.40)

I have setup The Sky X for another source to try but the weather is bad so I'll wait until I have a decent enough sky to test further.

In MaxImDl I have the choice of using the following. For Camera1 I have the ASI2600 and Camera2 is the

sreilly24590

I just tried using both MaxImDl w/ACP and The Sky X and neither could get past calibration. It would take the guide image, allow me to choose a stra and calibrate. Then when told to Track it would say it was taking the image and never download anything. Subsequent attempts to take and image failed. It would appear to do so and never download an image. My ASCOM version is 6.6 SP2. MaxImDl is 6.40, and TSX is the very latest build. I have a Universal License. I can't get past this point. I've double checked to be sure the driver is setup properly and in MaxIm I see two choices to set the and either choice ends with the same result, no active guider after calibration.

I have no idea where to go from here. I've tried two softwares with the same results. Intersetly the guider had worked once before a week or so ago and nothing software wise has changed that I'm aware of. This is a Windows 10 Pro 64 computer.

I tried connecting the camera via USB directly to the computer versus the Pegasus with not difference. I have copied the log files and 2 are attached here:

ascomasicamera1529170830.txt

5kB

ascomasicamera1529304820.txt

21kB

I have no idea where to look on this. After calibration and failed tracking attempts, no image from guider and reads "downloading" for both main chip and guider attempts.

sreilly24590

OK, went out this morning and checked connections, cables, and software settings. Same issue with guider BUT then I had a weird thought and decided to chevage my guider settings to use BIN 2 instead of BIN 1. And that works as it should. I haven't seen anything that indicated you should not use BIN 1 and I'm not sure if it's an ASCOM issue of a ZWO driver issue. I can't honestly say what BIN rate I used when testing the camera a week or two ago and had no issues but if BIN 1 isn't usable for guiding then why have it as a choice?

Due to my mount, AP Mach2, having absolute encoders I need longer guider times then I use to so BIN 1 was an obvious choice and a delay between exposures. Am I missing something here with BIN 1 not working for guiding and eventually even preventing the Main chip from downloading it's image? The only change I made with Camera2 is set the BIN rate from 1 to 2 and it would then work. Well I think it would as it's daylight now and clouds/rain the rest of the week.

Hope to test under the stars soon and report back.

The Last shows the guider set for BIN 1 which will not work. The middle image is setting to BIN 2 which does work as image 1 shows...

Tech@ZWO

sreilly24590 Could you test the camera in PHD2 and ASIStudio to see if it works? if it works fine means the problem is with the software which will help us to rule out the problem. thanks.

sreilly24590

I will download and install PHD2 and ASIStudio and try to test on our next clear night but that may be a week or so.

sreilly24590

Last night I finally had a clear night with little wind. I opened PHD2 and connected the camera. I used the wizard to calibrate which went fast and succeed. I set none of the parameters except the exposure time and used what ever is default. I took an image, choose the star. I had slewed the telescope (92mm AP Stowaway) to M44. When I took a 3 second image using the default setting in PHD2 and let it calibrate which was successful. At that point it was guiding but no idea if it was at Bin1 or Bin2. I used ASIImage to take a single 500 second image which displayed fine. Then setup a series of 20 - 300 second images and created the folder to download the images to. Here something went off track. The only thing saved was the 1st two folders that was supposed to have the zipped files I'm guessing.
There were no images so I switched back to MaxIm and imaged the 20 images there which was successful. I haven't found a reason for the images to not be saved in that folder. ASIIMage nevr showed the image count declining after each image. It always showed 0 of 20 and just kept running.

At this point I have no idea how to determine what Bin rate the guider was running and suspect it's too late to determine that unless there's a log file for last night. I'll look.

sreilly24590

Continuing with this setup in MaxIm I have had a number of times that I would slew to a target, take a guider image and wait for the download. If it downloaded I would then choose the star to guide on. Then start the guider. If all went well then it would continue to guide until I stopped it. If it didn't down load I would have to disconnect and reconnect the camera before I could continue. On numerous tried I've had to disconnect/reconnect to get access to the guider. Once going it would run fine until I stopped it, usually at the end of a target run.

As requested before, I had used PHD2 and ASIImage but none of the images were saved for some reason. If skies are clear tonight I'll try again. To be clear, this setup is run using a Pegasus Power Box which I have now bypassed with a USB active extender cable going straight to the computer and using the power supply vs the 12V from the Pegasus Power Box.

btschumy

I’ve had a similar problem using my ASI220MM camera with INDIGO. If I used either 1x1 binning or full resolution, the exposure would fail. The only way I could consistently get it to work was to 2x2 bin it and used half resolution. The INDIGO folks reported it to ZWO and they have worked on it some. It appeared to be an issue with the driver triggered by how INDIGO was calling the routines.

After several weeks of back and forth, I finally switched to INDI and the problem went away. I didn’t get the sense that ZWO was close to fixing it.