ASCOM CoolerOn and CoolerPower

dhickey

I'm writing an application in C# to connect to the ASCOM drivers for my setup and retrieve information about each device while they're running. I first connect everything in SGP then connect with my application. No problem there. When I read the various camera properties, although the CanGetCoolerPower returns True, the CoolerOn property is always False and CoolPower is always zero. In SGP, the cooler is On and cooling the camera fine. This is with an ASI1600MM-Cool.

Is there some type of protection in the ASCOM driver that will not allow a second connection to ASCOM to access those properties? I can see why the Set versions of those properties might be restricted, but not the Get. I also see something similar happen with the Gain property. When it connects, I get the Gain. But as an imaging session progresses in SGP I never see the Gain value update (I'm polling it every 30 seconds) even when SGP switches gain in an event.

Thanks,

Dave

chad

Hi Dave,

I think you should call the Connected to get the camera's connection status first.

This part is designed by ASCOM, not us. If you do not call this function, and just connect the camera, there will be 2 objects. They have the same attributes, but different memory allocations. At this point, the protection mechanism in our code will lead to these strange result when you access some properties.

Thanks

Chad

dhickey

Hi Chad,

My current sequence is to call the Chooser to select the camera (which returns "ASCOM.ASICamera2.Camera"), then pass this into the Camera constructor to get a new Camera object. If I called Connected on this, it comes back as False even though SGP is already connected to the camera. I'm not surprised since they're separate applications. Is there a way to do this differently such that my application would see what is already connected to SGP?

Dave

chad

chad wrote:
Hi Dave,

I think you should call the Connected to get the camera's connection status first.

This part is designed by ASCOM, not us. If you do not call this function, and just connect the camera, there will be 2 objects. They have the same attributes, but different memory allocations. At this point, the protection mechanism in our code will lead to these strange result when you access some properties.

Thanks

Chad

Hi Dave,

Sorry, I made a mistake. Forget the last post.

If you call the Connected function in different thread, they will return different values. So it should not work.

So for ASCOM, it is also hard to avoid initial twice. I talked about the protection mechanism in our code with my partener, but we find there are other problems. there is no way to tell us whether the second opening is the restart of the first thread or the initialization of the second thread. So there is no good way to avoid this problem now.

Sorry again.

Thanks

Chad

dhickey

Ok, thanks for looking into it.

Dave