Autofocus hang / crash

Hi
I am having a problem with auto focus in the fact if it is called for either manually or automatically

it is hanging/crashing 75 % off the time

If I see no graph appear I know the old reboot will be required , but if the graph appears all works just fine

I have only seen this with my new sx 56 camera - do not know if this is coincidence

attached are 2 small logs with manual call and crash and the larger from a imaging run where it worked on a manual run but the failed around 1.15 am unfortunately ending the imaging session

Harrylogs.zip (85.6 KB)

It looks like we paused guiding to run auto focus and maybe didn’t trap the message. Have you previously been pausing guiding while running auto focus?

I’ll see if I can duplicate this.

Thanks,
Jared

Hi
Yes I have paused the guiding before , only recently it has been a problem

Harry

Hi
I tried tonight without pausing guiding but still the same crash

Harry

Hi
Just tried a different camera and same result auto focus hang/crash

Harry

Hi Chaps

Any thoughts on this Please

Harry

Hi

Further bump I appreciate I seem to be the only person reporting this , but really really annoying

Everything else work just this , can not make it out !!!

Harry

Hi Harry,

I’ve not run into that as a chronic problem. FWIW, I’m now using a CEM120 non encoder mount. A few weeks back I took the plunge and cleaned up all of the cables. So nothing hangs off the scope.
This meant using the in and out USB connections. For the most part everything works well. And when it does, this is a very nice setup. However, at times I have exercised the guider or the camera or the focuser multiple times prior to starting a sequence for whatever reason. I’ve learned from experience that at those times I really need to reboot the computer and scope.

Sorry this isn’t more help to you.

Mark

Hi
thanks for chipping in , I am 99.9% sure this is not a hardware problem :slight_smile:

I have spent a long time with various manufacture’s of my hardware with drivers and firmware to make it as SGP
friendly as possible .
I have a suspicion that its a timing issue with my camera driver/firmware/hardware as it takes quite a few seconds for my camera to be ready for a exposure and do not know if SGP is waiting long enough
But of course I could be wrong :slight_smile:
Regards

Ian Page

Not trying to ignore this, just don’t have a solution. Unfortunately I think I’m going to have to duplicate this in order to figure out what’s going on or potentially add more logging around it.

Did you have recovery on? It should have at least caught the error and attempted to restart PHD or do…something.

Thanks,
Jared

Hi
Yes I did have recovery on , but do not think its to do with the autoguider as I disabled it for a test and it still
did it ?
More Logging ?

Harry

Hi
Bump again , I can not use autofocus now as it always crashes , I have tried another computer with the same problem , so Its something with my set up .

Is there anything that can be done to find the problem please

Thanks
Harry

Hi
Ok I think I have found the problem . not sure how to resolve it but here we go
My focuser connects ok and sgp thinks all ok
when I go to autofocus , the focuser answers sometimes very slowly or it seems not at all , If the focuser is slow
or does not move sgp hangs . if the focuser moves in time happy days
I do not know why my focuser is erratically slow ( hardware or driver or sgp not sending commands ? )
so perhaps sgp should at least say focuser error rather than crash , are we able to see if focuser commands are being sent ?
Thanks
Harry

I presume you have checked the power supply to the focuser. Obviously it is getting power…but is there any chance that it is not getting full power when it needs it. (Sometimes yes/sometimes no?)

Just a thought - so very hard to be constructive without actually having ‘hands on’.

Kinch.

Hi
Thanks tried all the usual cables etc and it has plenty of power , the controller reports temp and position fine

so not sure what the problem is , looks like the focuser is not receiving instructions ??

Harry

It’s probably the focuser driver, i had similiar problems with the driver for USB focus (which is total garbage btw)
My problem was never solved by the developer so i bought another motor focuser.

Hi
I have 3 different drivers all with the same problem , so don’t think its this

I am beginning to wonder if something is blocking commands to motors , bit of a struggle this one

Has Mr Microsoft done something with a update !!!

Harry

@harry

We always try and do this where possible. Sometimes, due to the very low level of the software we interact with (driver level), sometimes we transfer flow control to the driver and we never get it back… thus we have no ability to trap the error (at least in that thread). The only way to combat this is to create another parallel running thread that serves as a “watchdog”. For obvious reasons, we cannot create one of these for every type of equipment failure (we do certainly have watchdog threads for lots of things in SGPro). Anyhow… that’s probably more info than you were looking for…

For this particular issue, we call in to the focuser driver to have it temporarily shut down its internal temperature compensation logic. It seems like if your focuser is moving then bad things happen… maybe? Either way, we never return from this call and we cannot continue.

It would be helpful to grab the focuser logs that correspond to the SGPro logs so we can see both sides.

Hi
I will see If I can get some focuser logs and see what gives :slight_smile:

Even when I am doing a manual autofocus and sgp Hangs , I can not cancel the autofocus - cant we at least make SGP recoverable without a restart ?

Thanks for the reply

Harry

@harry

Almost anything in tech is possible, but in this case, I will say that doing this is unlikely. SGPro was not architected with inherent distrust of the drivers it uses. Because of this, when some things die in SGPro, they cannot be resurrected without restart. In order to do what you are asking, we would need to rewrite major aspects of SGPro that account for self-healing and never trusting a driver to do what it says it will do. For the most part, these situations are resolved through careful, polite discussion with the driver author and don’t require special software to cope with external bugs. SGPro is very good about reporting issues with drivers as long as that driver actually returns control. If it doesn’t we are stuck.

We have discussed rearchitecting the way in which we communicate with gear and, at some point, we would like to abstract it away from the main sequence flow, but these things require time.

This can mean a lot of different things. I would need to see logs to understand what you are doing when you are manually focusing. There is certainly a path in some manual focus routines where SGPro will still disable internal temperature compensation.