new warning message?

[Brian Valente]

I just got this warning message about PHD2 not being able to make sufficient corrections in RA. I've never seen this before, and it's particularly odd that it's saying this when my overall RMS is 0.48". RA is a bit higher than DEC, but it's still 0.39"

Is this something i should investigate or is it more informative?

thanks

Brian

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Brian 

Brian Valente

portfolio brianvalentephotography.com 

[bw_msgboard]

Hi Brian – as you know we can’t tell anything without a log file… J

 

Bruce

 

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[Brian Valente]

Yes SIR!

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_p344.zip

i was more just seeing if it was worth looking at the logs, but I guess you answered that in a roundabout way ;)

B

[bw_msgboard]

Hi Brian.  Here’s what the alert means in general (help file):

 

Maximum-Duration Limit Alerts
During normal guiding, you may see an alert message saying that your settings for maximum-duration limits in RA or Dec are preventing PHD2 from keeping the guide star locked.  If you've decreased these parameters from their default values, you should consider increasing them.  However, if the limits are well above one second, this alert probably indicates you've encountered a mechanical problem that needs to be corrected.  In the simplest cases, you may have suffered a cable snag, wind gust, mount bump, or other external event that caused the guide star to move by a large amount.  In such cases, you simply need to correct the problem if you can and proceed with guiding.  But in other cases, the alert may be triggered by a steadily growing guide star displacement that is not being corrected at all.  For example, if PHD2 can't move the mount correctly in either the north or south directions, the cumulative uncorrected error will eventually reach a point that triggers the alert.  These sorts of problems will require careful diagnosis and correction and simply increasing the maximum-duration limits will not help.

 

In your case, it was triggered by large excursions in both RA (red) and Dec (green), of which RA was the larger:

 

 

In this case, the necessary RA correction would have been greater than the RA max-move, which is why you got the alert.

 

Looks like you had another problem like it later in the night but not as severe:

 

 

Nothing new about these alerts although the message text has been changed a bit.

 

Good luck,

[Andy Galasso]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the logs. They are showing some very unexpected behavior that I have not seen before.  From about 20:45 to 21:28 there are huge gaps in time -- up to several minutes -- in the PHD2 camera/mount worker thread at the completion of a camera exposure or mount move.  The main thing that happens in the code in the time interval is the app is making some Windows API calls related to notifying the main UI thread that the exposure or move has completed. Ordinarily these calls take milliseconds, but for some reason they take minutes in the time window.  After about 21:28 everything went back to normal.

Are you aware of any activity by other apps on the PC during that time interval?

The alert messages are being triggered by the ordinary drift (RA and dec) that happens as PHD2 is stuck for minutes at a time, so they are just a side effect of the Windows problem.

This may be hard to track down if you don't have any ideas about something unusual that could have been going on in that time interval.  It might be worth checking the Windows event log to see if there are any clues in there for the time frame.

Andy

[Brian Valente]

Hi Andy

 

I have a dedicated intel NUC on the scope, so it wasn’t me! Lol. I’ll have to check.

 

There were some clouds rolling in and I paused SGP to see if it would clear, I wonder if that was it? I’ll have to look more closely

 

Thanks for the tip on the alert.

 

 

Thanks

 

Brian

 

portfolio https://www.brianvalentephotography.com/

 

From: open-phd...@googlegroups.com [mailto:open-phd...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andy Galasso
Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 8:02 AM
To: OpenPHD Guiding <open-phd...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [open-phd-guiding] new warning message?

 

Hi Brian,

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[Brian Valente]

Okay thanks Bruce

 

I’ll watch for that. And see if I can correlate to anything else going on (wind, etc.)

 

 

Thanks

 

Brian

 

portfolio https://www.brianvalentephotography.com/

 

[Andy Galasso]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 12:04 PM Brian Valente <bval...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

I have a dedicated intel NUC on the scope, so it wasn’t me! Lol. I’ll have to check.

 

There were some clouds rolling in and I paused SGP to see if it would clear, I wonder if that was it? I’ll have to look more closely

I don't think pausing SGP would have anything to do with it, but worth knowing.

I vaguely recall there being some issue reported in the past with a NUC related to power saving settings. You might want to look into your windows power settings to make sure there's nothing that would allow it to go to sleep when waiting for an exposure or a guide pulse to complete.

We may have also had a report in the past related to a NUC and remote desktop software. Not sure which remote desktop you are using, but you could try switching to a different one (VNC/RDP/TeamViewer) and see if changing makes a difference.

I'm also suspecting some code in wxWidgets, the cross-platform GUI framework used by PHD2.  If you find that the problem is reproducible and the other suggestions don't work we could give you a test version of PHD2 built with a newer version of wxWidgets to see if that solves it.

Did you see anything unusual in the Windows event logs between 20:45 and 21:28?

Andy

[Brian Valente]

It’s on the scope and put away for the day, but I will check

 

If it was a systemic issue, I’m pretty sure I would have seen more of that by now. I’m generally in the 0.5-0.7” RMS, and with colder weather coming it’s been trending even lower, so things overall are doing well.

 

One thing that’s annoying with Windows 10 is the default window for updates is at night, so I’ve had it reboot itself a couple times, but that’s a setting that can change

 

I use remote desktop, it does a great job.

 

It’s interesting you mention widgets.

 

I switch between ipad and win10 computer client as I move about the house, but at some point last night I lost the brain button and the camera button – they just disappeared!

 

Clicking in the space where they should be didn’t do anything. I rebooted phd2 and they were back.

 

 

Thanks

 

Brian

 

portfolio https://www.brianvalentephotography.com/

 

From: open-phd...@googlegroups.com [mailto:open-phd...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andy Galasso
Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 9:27 AM
To: OpenPHD Guiding <open-phd...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [open-phd-guiding] new warning message?

 

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 12:04 PM Brian Valente <bval...@gmail.com> wrote:

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