Connection issues
Aaron Dizack
What a frustrating night…
The issue:
CPWI Connection to my mount is lost when guiding
The equipment:
Celestron CGEM mount, ZWO ASI Mini guide cam, 2016 MacBook Pro, QHY Polemaster, Celestron Starsense, Nikon Z6
Software:
Celestron CPWI, PHD2 guiding, Backyard Nikon (all three running on Windows 10 via Parallels)
The setup:
Mount connected to laptop via USB cable through hand controller, Guidecam connected to laptop via USB, Nikon connected to laptop through USB
Tests completed:
Running each independently…
1. Backyard Nikon can connect to and control Z6 w/o any issues for an infinite amount of time
2. CPWI can connect to and control mount w/o any issues for an infinite amount of time
3. PHD2 can connect to camera and run w/o issues for an infinite amount of time (just camera—not connecting to the mount)
4. Cables/cords are not getting unplugged and have been swapped with no change in results
However, when I connect the guidecam and mount in PHD2, my issues arise. The connection is made successfully, and I can calibrate and start guiding but after a minute or so, CPWI loses connection to the mount and (obviously) guiding is lost. The only remedy is to power cycle the mount. Once I do that, I can reconnect but will again lose connection after a minute or so.
What should I do next? Could this be a USB (Thunderbolt) port power issue?
David Kerber
traffic. Is the computer USB-2 or -3? If 3, are your cables also USB-3
rated?
Are you going through a hub, or are you running all 3 cables directly to
your computer, each to its own port?
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Aaron Dizack
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David Kerber
cam, since the other connections aren't used for power, only comms. So
you might try a powered hub for the camera connection. Or possibly for
all of them combined.
I use a Startech powered USB-3 hub to carry everything except my
Mallincam guide cam; it goes directly to the computer, but that's for
bandwidth reasons rather than power; it's a 16Mpx camera, so it moves a
lot of data.
HTH!
Dave
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bw_msgboard
Hi Aaron. You’ve gotten some good advice already on this but I’ll try to add a few points. You’ve basically got 3 devices on the USB subsystem, main camera, guide camera, and mount, and any of those (or any pair) may trigger the problem. There’s a section in the PHD2 documentation that talks about how to isolate these things:
Here are some diagnostic steps that can help you isolate these kinds of
problems:
Common sources of camera timeout problems are the USB subsystem
on the host computer, incompatible USB3/USB2 connections, damaged or
low-quality USB cables, or flakey camera drivers. You will probably need
to work through a number of scenarios to see what your problem is.
Fortunately, this can usually be done in the daytime by putting the
cameras in continuous-exposure mode and letting them run. Start by
connecting just the imaging camera and the guiding camera because these will be
the two heaviest users of the USB subsystem. To start, there are often
problems when a USB-2 camera is connected to a USB-3 port on your computer.
Those things are supposed to be backward-compatible but that’s only
at the hardware level – the driver implementations can be adversely
affected. There are two areas to look at: 1) USB traffic and bandwidth
and 2) power delivery to the cameras. Your main imaging camera probably
has its own power supply but other devices like the guide camera may be powered
via the USB cable. If that’s the case for you, you may want to try
using a powered USB hub to deliver power to the camera. It’s also
best to use high-quality USB cable with a 24AWG power conductor and eliminate
long USB cable runs and USB extenders. If your problem seems to be with
USB traffic, there may be other things you can try:
- Make sure your computer is running from AC power and that the OS can't disable the USB ports for power conservation. Don't run other resource-intensive applications while trying to image.
- Bin the guide camera to reduce the size of the downloaded guider images
- Adjust the USB usage limit of the camera if the camera driver supports that option
- Use sub-frames in PHD2
- If you’re running Windows, you can use a Microsoft tool to map out how the various USB ports are tied to the USB controllers in the computer. Then you can try to isolate the two cameras on separate USB buses.
- Try using a different camera driver (e.g. an ASCOM driver) if one is available
It’s a bit unusual that you would keep seeing the problem on the mount connection, that’s the one with the least amount of traffic. I think there has been a history of problems with the CPWI driver and the matching mount firmware so you may need to contact Celestron to get help with this problem. I also suspect that power-cycling the mount shouldn’t be necessary to clear the problem – have you tried simply un-plugging, pausing, and re-plugging that USB cable? I would guess part of your frustration comes from having to burn dark-sky time for this but I think that can be avoided. You should be able to test all of this during the daytime. The two camera connections can be run in continuous exposure mode to generate the typical traffic and power demands. In order to force pulse-guide commands from PHD2, you can install and use this testing tool:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Amy5FkXK3OuQgnI-GyR1Wx0rwbUF?e=apCn7R
This tool will generate a continuous sequence of guide commands, at the rate you specify, without letting the mount move around by any appreciable amount. You should be able to duplicate the problem in the daytime with this approach. Once you do that, you can start experimenting to see which device is triggering the problem and then do something to change how its connected to the PC or how it gets power.
Hope this helps,
Bruce
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Aaron Dizack
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