Dear ZWO,
I am using both a ASI120MC and a ASI120MM. The MC is brand new and the MM was used about 6 months ago without ANY problems on exactly the same Raspberry Pi v2 system. But now am I experiencing many strange problems.
1. None of the cameras would take images out-of-the-box with the latest indi for an up-to-date RPi. They would go into a loop of exposures (from Pix Insight) but never return an image. Then I flashed both cameras with the "compatibility" firmware and they started to work. This was NOT happening 6 months ago where I used the 120MM with the original firmware.
2. Before flashing the "compatibility" firmware, I could make the RPi change its IP address by running the commands:
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_setprop "ZWO CCD ASI120MC.CONNECTION.CONNECT=On"
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_setprop "ZWO CCD ASI120MC.UPLOAD_MODE.UPLOAD_LOCAL=On"
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_setprop "ZWO CCD ASI120MC.CCD_EXPOSURE.CCD_EXPOSURE_VALUE=0.1"
My RPi is set up with a static IP address, but the above forced the RPi to obtain a new address via dhcp! See also the discussion here:
http://www.indilib.org/forum/ccds-dslrs/1656-asi-120-exposure-looping.html
After flashing the "compatibility" firmware the above two issues disappeared, but other issues appeared. They are described here
http://indilib.org/forum/ccds-dslrs/1730-asi-120mc-bug.html
and listed below for convenience.
3. The RPi with the ASI then ran fine all last night with the ASI as an all-sky camera capturing an image every minute, but when I tried to copy the files from the RPi to my laptop using ssh the RPi crashed completely. In my own logs, I can see that the capturing script complains about not capturing anything (it does not find the .fits file) just before the RPi crashes and the RPi becomes impossible to reach on any IP address (so it does seemingly not do as in no. 2 above). I am able to reproduce the bug, as it have happened several times when copying files from the RPi. If I copy without indi_asi_ccd running, the coping of the files works fine.
4. Then, suddently I could completely crash the indi_asi_ccd driver by doing:
pi@observatory ~ $ echo "stop indi_asi_ccd" >indiFIFO
pi@observatory ~ $ echo "start indi_asi_ccd" >indiFIFO
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_setprop "ZWO CCD ASI120MC.CONNECTION.CONNECT=On"
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_getprop | grep ASI | wc -l
104
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_setprop "ZWO CCD ASI120MC.CCD_EXPOSURE.CCD_EXPOSURE_VALUE=0.0001"
pi@observatory ~ $ indi_getprop | grep ASI | wc -l
0
I have tried to reboot the RPi and power-cycle everything and it still does this. The very short exposures worked well a few hours before this. Doing a longer exposure, say 0.1s, instead of the small one above, the driver does not crash but I get no image.
I then connected the camera to my windows machine and it worked fine in windows. I then reconnected it to the RPi and power-shuffeled everything and now the above sequence works as expected again (returning a the same number in the last command as in the 3rd command).
To sum up: What was working wonderfully for me some months ago (and the reason why I just got a color ASI120) seem to have become extremely buggy for some reason. It seems to me that all of this could be related to the USB traffic, because AFAIK the ethernet and USB shares the same chip in the RPi, thus heavy ethernet trafic (by copying files using ssh) might do something to the USB transfer rate. There is also the posibility that it is related to an update of the RPi rather than indi/indi_asi_ccd.
Any ideas on how to fix this and how can I help in the process?
Best Regards,
Søren
