pulseguide command to mount has failed
almcl
bw_msgboard
Hi Al, sorry you’re having trouble. I think about all we can say from the logs is that the problem lies in a layer “below” PHD2 - the ASCOM driver, the connection to the mount, or the mount firmware. This PHD2 error message shows up when a guide command is issued but doesn’t complete in a reasonable time. PHD2 uses a timeout period of 2 seconds, which gets added to the actual size of the guide pulse. To take one specific example, we issued a 169ms guide pulse east at 00:38:13.4. You would expect that to be completed in 170ms + some small amount of overhead for communication. But by 00:38:15.6, the driver was still reporting the move had not been completed – more than 2 full seconds after it was started. That happened several times in the _214821 log with guiding in either RA or Dec.
This code in PHD2 hasn’t been changed in a long time. Has something else changed in your environment? A different driver, any inadvertent changes in settings in EQASCOM, a different laptop, firmware upgrade to the mount? Is anything new or different plugged in to one of the other ports on the laptop? Have you always used an ASCOM connection to the camera? Is there plenty of power being delivered to all the USB devices? Are you using a USB hub or USB extenders? It could be an intermittent communication problem with the USB cable or one of the ports although this is a bit unusual. Or perhaps it happens when there’s a download active on the main camera – there’s no way to tell from the log file. The pulse-guide commands are by far the most common forms of traffic between PHD2 and the mount so those are the ones that usually expose intermittent problems like these.
There were also some other errors earlier in the log, around 22:00 and 22:22. In those cases, a guide command failed because the scope started slewing before the command completed. Was that true, were you just flailing around? Or is this an indication of a different kind of problem?
Sorry I can’t be more specific,
Bruce
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almcl
Brian Valente
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bw_msgboard
It will probably take some work to isolate the problem. Obviously, the cable is the easiest thing to replace and that may fix it Beyond that, the next question mark is the new guide cam and the load it creates on your USB sub-system. Looking again at your log, I see a situation at 22:52:43 where your PC seemingly doesn’t do anything for 4 seconds. PHD2 would have been polling the mount during this period yet nothing is returned. Did you notice any sort of “freeze” in the application UIs? This sort of thing can be caused by a kernel-level device driver or a hardware-related problem but not by an application. This can cause you all sorts of mysterious trouble and may be related to the weird slewing behavior you saw. If replacing the cable doesn’t fix it, you may need to look deeper into the USB system and how heavily its being used by all the attached devices. Depending on the laptop, you may be able to spread the load a bit by choosing different ports. That said, your guide camera would not have been exposing or downloading at the point the guide commands were being processed, but I don’t know what might have been going on with your main imaging camera.
Good luck,
Bruce
From: open-phd...@googlegroups.com [mailto:open-phd...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of almcl
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018
9:34 AM
To: Open PHD Guiding
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almcl
On Thursday, September 13, 2018 at 9:12:23 AM UTC+1, almcl wrote: