Last night during a meridian flip process, the filter change to Lum for the plate solve failed. So SGP terminated the process. However, it did not do any of the end of sequence ops and continued tracking into my mount limit. When I discovered this an hour later, the UI was responsive so I clicked Abort, which immediately crashed the program.
I should add that filter move failures are the single most consequential failures in my entire imaging process. They are the source of 90% of all my failures. Is there some recovery process that can be triggered, where perhaps I specify steps to be taken to solve the problem? The steps I take that always solve this problem are to disconnect the SBIG camera and filter wheel, power down the SBIG, power up the SBIG, then reconnect camera and filter wheel. Then sometimes I have to go to the filter tab of the Control Panel and explicitly set a filter because it sometimes is stuck moving.
Is this kind of filter failure going to trigger a message to the Notification System?
The source of this problem is a real mystery to me. The hardware seems fine and can run an entire night without this happening, or it might happen more that once a night. Any ideas on how I can diagnose this?
Are any others users having problems with filter changes, particularly with SBIG?
I found and fixed this issue. When the CFW fails during solve and sync, the sequence should abort properly now.
Not sure what this would be. The filter wheel is continually reporting it is in a moving state… unless it takes more than 30 seconds to change filters. Does yours do this? If it does, this may be your problem and we can increase the timeout.
You mean physically moving? or that SGPro just says it is moving?
This is already in place. A notification is sent when this happens.
Does your camera and CFW put out logs? I can’t remember for SBIG. It would be interesting to compare SGPro’s version of truth with the CFWs and see what’s going on.
None reported to us, but this is an open question so I’ll let others answer it if they are…
What I mean by the reporting as “moving” is that is the status verbiage on the filter tab of the Control Panel, and no filter shows as loaded. If SGP is not in the process of trying to move the filter to the next required filter, it always works for me to select any filter, then click Set. It then promptly sets that filter and I am good to go. This is a common state it comes up in when I first connect the filter wheel, so my SOP is to do this immediately after connecting equipment.
No, the filter wheel is not really moving when it says this.
The time to cycle through all 7 filters is about 15 seconds. I will time it to be sure, but not nearly 30.