PHD 2.6 and camera timeout

[Joel Short]

Since updating to PHD 2.6 I have been getting the following error message:

"After 8.0 seconds the camera has not completed a 3.0 second exposure..."

I'm using a Lodestar for guiding.

When I went into the camera tab in advanced settings I noticed that in the field to set the "Disconnect non-responsive camera after (seconds)", the tooltip says that the default is 15sec and mine was set to 5sec.  As I do not remember every seeing this setting or changing it before, I'm wondering if the default setting is actually 5sec while the default should be 15sec as stated in the tooltip.

If instead this is an error or a bug, I can post the debug log as well as the SX Lodestar ascom log if that would be helpful.

joel

[Andy Galasso]

Hi Joel,

If you were previously using an earlier version of PHD2, then your camera timeout setting would have been initialized to the default value in the earlier version (5 seconds).  Upgrading does not change the value that was set previously. You can change the setting to 15s in the brain (Camera tab) if you want to see if that makes the problem go away.

If you were using one of the later 2.5.0 dev builds, it is unlikely that the camera timeouts are related to upgrading to 2.6.0 since 2.6.0 is basically the same as 2.5.0dev9.  But we can certainly take a look at your PHD2 debug log if you want to post it.

Andy

[Joel Short]

I was indeed using 2.5.0 dev build 9 prior to 2.6 so now this problem is a bit more troubling.  Here's a link to 2 debug files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w2y2jqlihy7n67s/PHD.zip?dl=0

The first debug log was from last night while actually guiding.  The second log from today was just looping exposures while I was taking darks.  I received the warning message both times.  Last night while actually guiding it appeared to me that the camera was disconnected during a dither and SGP was waiting for PHD to respond which it never did.  I had to kill SGP with task manager.

joel

[Andy Galasso]

Joel,

The logs are showing the camera timing-out as the message indicates.  PHD2 was successfully able to re-connect to the camera and resume guiding.

You could try increasing the camera timeout setting, but the timeouts are usually just a symptom of an underlying communication issue between the camera and the PC, for example a flaky USB cable.   Could anything else have changed around when you started seeing the alerts?

Andy