Totally agree - been imaging for over 15 years - so its just getting used to your product vs TSX, MaximDL, BYE, N.I.N.A. CCDStack, PEMPro, CCDSharp, DSS and so many, many more! Hear really good things about SGP by the way! Will be watching how to videos every night till my control PC is rebuilt!
I presume two (or more) Equipment profiles can have imaging runs associated with them - and they can run concurrently?
At least you won’t have to spend time learning how your equipment should behave LOL. SGP is very powerful and it takes time to learn the many different settings etc that you will need to tune to your equipment. I had the advantage of learning SGP while it was still being developed (I’m not a developer, just a happy user and forum moderator).
Joel,
All credit I find it beautifully intuitive. At present I am only using one camera through SGP a ZWO ASI1600MM-0c (and forgot to say cool down camera on connect). I ran all my darks and now testing it again on some 1-2 minute luminance filter shots of NGC 5139 as a continuing sea trial.
One thing that I really do have to sort out - and its an issue I suspect for ZWO not you guys - but love your thoughts. Running two cameras (ZWO ASI071MC-c in APT and the 1600MM-c in SGP I often find 20 - 40 shots into a sequence one of the cameras will stop downloading until I halt the sequence and select disconnect camera, reconnect camera and recommence my sequence. The camera operate from one of two powered USB3/2 port hubs, connected by 3 metre USB3 cable to a USB 3 ports in my astro-lab PC.
I suspect it is the amount of power delivered by USB3 (each camera’s cooler connects to a large lab power supply that can give massive current/at 12V.
Does anyone else see this sort of behaviour here - or have suggestions how to fix it? I have raised this in the Australian Astronomy user group and ZWO Facebook forums - but although many users say yes we have seen this, no developer has provided any suggestions on how to resolve / minimise this.
Many thanks,
Matthew
An intermittent issue like this is probably either USB power related or USB download related. As a test, can you bypass the USB hub and connect the cameras directly to the computer and run a bunch of darks to see if you have download issues?
When I had two QHY CMOS cameras I actually resorted to using USB 2.0 (yes 2.0) cables because anything else and I encountered issues. The downloads were a few seconds longer but it was very reliable.
Hi Joel,
On a 3 metre USB3 cable and on a 5m USB3 cable plus extender either camera fails to be detected by Windows 10. Put it on a Powered hub and they get detected straight away. So I think it is definitely the power on the USB3 cable itself that is critical!
Matthew
Hi Joel,
Narrowed it down to a weird error thanks to APT’s new monitor USB capability; my ASI0120MM-s guide camera when connected on four different USB3 ports keeps disconnecting and reconnecting on two different powered hubs - and this seems to be stuffing up downloads for my main ZWO imaging cameras. When I put the 120MM-s on a USB2 port everything was stable as. I will try a third powered USB3 port tomorrow and see if the problem persists or goes away. Still awaiting ZWO’s feedback on this strange problem scenario - but thanks for your help!
Regards,
Matthew