Orion SSAG pro mono autoguider times out w PHD 2.2.1 and 2.6.9 help required

[Raghav Laul]

Dear ASCOM support group, a lot of information regarding my Orion SSAG Pro Mono is captured in this email and email trail. However just to summarise, I had purchased an Orion SSAG Pro Mono in 2017 which was working fine on Win 7. On updating to Win 10 i have been having issues w.r.t. PHD 2.2.1 and 2.6.9 where the camera disconnects/times out after 2-5 minutes. I have already un installed and re-installed as per instructions from Orion as below as well as replaced the cable. Still nothing seems to work. Below are logs from ASCOM diagnostics as well as PHD along with screen grabs. 

Can you, along with support from Orion (copied in the email) please guide me on as to how I can resolve this issue? 

Also your link on the ASCOM website for Orion drivers doesnt seem to be working .

Regards

Raghav Laul

(M) +919810561265

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 1:52 PM Raghav Laul <ragha...@gmail.com> wrote:

HI Rich, also re-installed an older version of PHD 2.2.1....which was originally supplied w the autoguider.....no errors but frame freezes after 2 minutes, 5 minutes and the application hangs

PHD 2.2.1 no errors displayed but frame freezes after 2 minutes (ref attachment)

also attached ascom logs:

see if this is the issue?

 and this

looking forward to hearing back from you.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 1:13 PM Raghav Laul <ragha...@gmail.com> wrote:

i think we have a direction please look at this screenshot below:

On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 2:33 PM Raghav Laul <ragha...@gmail.com> wrote:

HI Rich, have followed all the steps below. Interesting observation.....there are NO timeouts on Astrocap at all. However on PHD2:

this happens when trying to even build a dark library....it stalls when it touches 2.5 seconds or more

Do advise...any recommendations / suggestions?

Regards

Raghav Laul

(M) +919810561265

On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 4:36 AM Orion Telescopes & Binoculars <ser...@telescope.com> wrote:

[ticket: 17661413]Dear Raghav Laul,
Original Inquiry: issue with orion SSAG Pro mono astrophotography camera.....keeps timing out on PHD2....seems to be a driver issue for windows 10 64bit version. can u please help me w resolving this?

Thank you for contacting Orion Telescopes & Binoculars.

52031 grabs.docx

Some follow up to your recent issue. You had mentioned a walkthrough so I went through the process and documented each step. Attached you will find a word document with some screen grabs and comments. I did not screen grab the install dialog boxes. There was nothing unusual to document. I do not have an option to take control of your PC to run the install remotely.

I asked someone at the office to ship me a 52031 SAGPro I use for testing at my desktop at work. I do not use my home desktop machine--which I am now using for work remotely--with any astronomy related programs. This is, therefore, a clean install. Below are the steps in the order I took to run the StarShoot Autoguider Pro Mono. Downloads at www.telescope.com/sagpro

*Be sure to extract any zipped executable files prior to installing. Do not plug the camera to your desktop PC or laptop prior to completing these steps.

1. Download and install ASCOM platform 6.5 from ascom-standards.org
2. Download and install SAGPRO Driver (2/28/14)
3. Download and install SAGPRO ASCOM Driver (v1.2)
4. Download and install Orion AstroCap (v1.3.9)
5. Download and install PHD Guiding V2.2.6.9 (sic) (it is 2.6.9 - also available at openphdguiding.org)
6. Plug in the camera.

See attached 52031 grabs.docx for additional commentary.

Testing in AstroCap is optional. It's a good data point to confirm if the camera is properly recognized by Windows and the camera's native software.

When configuring PHD make certain that for your mount you are choosing "On-Camera" and not the Celestron mount as shown in one of your screen grabs from doc1.

I was still unable to replicate your issue. As you can see from the screen grabs in the attached document I was able to use the MonoPro on a current Win 10 machine using just the stock driver installs. The PHD logs are designed for use at the PHD Help Forums, you may want to submit them there. 

If you want to send me your System Information I can look into  if there is a specific issue with your setup.  If you want me to try a different set of parameters for Dark Frame Library I can try that too.

Windows systems, unlike Macs, can vary widely with different hardware configurations. We occasionally will run into a situation where there is a specific system incompatibility causing a glitch we are unable to resolve. Because of some of the forum posts you referenced earlier we have looked into this extensively in the past and have not found a specific fault with the driver causing a widespread issue.

If you wish to re-open your ticket (# 17661413) or if you have additional comments, please reply to this email.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions or concerns!

Thank you,
Rich
Tech Support
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars

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[Raghav Laul]

[bw_msgboard]

Hi Raghav.  We’re not the “ASCOM support group” so I don’t know if this message was really intended for us.  We support PHD2 but only the current releases, so your debug logs from the 2.2 release aren’t useful.  What you’re describing is a fairly common problem that almost always arises from hardware or low-level driver problems.  If you look in the manual in the Trouble Shooting section, you’ll find a rather detailed list of things you can do to isolate this specific kind of problem.  If you are running the new Win10 release on the same PC, you are probably using different USB drivers and are definitely subject to new power-management schemes for USB devices.  But there could be other things in play – for example, maybe you’re running in colder temperatures than before or maybe other things have changed in the PC environment.  And if the Win10 environment is running on a new or different PC, then there’s a whole range of possible contributors to the problem.  Applications like AstroCap often don’t encounter these problems because they operate the camera in a streaming mode and don’t generally check for timing errors.  But PHD2 uses the camera in single-exposure mode, so there is more back-and-forth data traffic with the camera and PHD2 always monitors for these delay conditions.  The good news is that you can do the testing and problem isolation during the day, you don’t need to waste dark-sky time.  

 

https://openphdguiding.org/manual/?section=Trouble_shooting.htm#Problems-_Camera_Timeouts

 

Good luck,

Bruce

 

 

 

---

1.      Download and install ASCOM platform 6.5 from ascom-standards.org

2.      Download and install SAGPRO Driver (2/28/14)

3.      Download and install SAGPRO ASCOM Driver (v1.2)

4.      Download and install Orion AstroCap (v1.3.9)

5.      Download and install PHD Guiding V2.2.6.9 (sic) (it is 2.6.9 - also available at openphdguiding.org)

6.      Plug in the camera.

 

See attached 52031 grabs.docx for additional commentary.

Testing in AstroCap is optional. It's a good data point to confirm if the camera is properly recognized by Windows and the camera's native software.

When configuring PHD make certain that for your mount you are choosing "On-Camera" and not the Celestron mount as shown in one of your screen grabs from doc1.

 

I was still unable to replicate your issue. As you can see from the screen grabs in the attached document I was able to use the MonoPro on a current Win 10 machine using just the stock driver installs. The PHD logs are designed for use at the PHD Help Forums, you may want to submit them there. 

 

If you want to send me your System Information I can look into  if there is a specific issue with your setup.  If you want me to try a different set of parameters for Dark Frame Library I can try that too.

 

Windows systems, unlike Macs, can vary widely with different hardware configurations. We occasionally will run into a situation where there is a specific system incompatibility causing a glitch we are unable to resolve. Because of some of the forum posts you referenced earlier we have looked into this extensively in the past and have not found a specific fault with the driver causing a widespread issue.

If you wish to re-open your ticket (# 17661413) or if you have additional comments, please reply to this email.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions or concerns!

Thank you,
Rich
Tech Support
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars

Powered by LiveHelpNow ®  ticket system

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[Raghav Laul]

Hi, thank you for replying....i finally seem to be getting responses! so yay! I am online right now and available on +9119810561265 (india number). I have deliberately sent this email to PHD, ASCOM and ORION support in the hope of getting an answer AND resolution to my problem which I will highlight again below:

In 2017 i bought the Orion SSAG Pro Mono based on the reviews of it being good for poor seeing conditions. It worked perfectly well on my then Win 7 Acer Aspire series laptop. Unfortunately wasnt able to test it on the field for a while....skip to 2020....i upgraded to Win 10 64 bit in jan and thats when the mess started. It kept timing out on 2.6.9. I then replaced the cable...same issue....downgraded from 2.6.9. all the way to 2.2.1 same issue. Ran it on Win 7 as a VM ....no issues....then stepped down to 1.1.4 on win 10 same issue of time out. Wrote to Orion....can forward you the email....they say they replicated this and faced no issues.....asked me to un install and re-install....same issue of time out. No time out on AStro Cap.

Leads me to believe its either a native driver issue with Orion on a 64 bit based platform or with ASCOM OR then w PHD not being configured or being able to support this camera natively.  How i arrived at this.....

1. Cable issue eliminated as cable was replaced

2. version of PHD eliminated as various versions have been tried

3. Same setup runs on a VM on Win 7...weird.....and doesnt run on the native Win 10 platform....so couldnt possibly be a USB 3.0 issue

4. Power issue eliminated as Ive even tried this via a powered USB hub

PLEASE PLEASE help me get to the bottom of this so that I can make full use of my setup as below:

 

Celestron 9.25 SGT / Advanced VX mount / Celestron Full frame OAG/ Canon EOS 550 Dand EOS 60D Full frame / Lenovo Yoga S740-14IIL and ORION Star Shoot Auto guider Pro mono.

Attached are older logs from PHD ....

PLEASE PLEASE advise and help resolve

Regards

Raghav Laul

(M) +919810561265

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/9C49AD8C222B4C5AA02CA29A09E1FD7B%40HomeDesktop.

[bw_msgboard]

I don’t see how we can tell you anything more – you need to work through the diagnostic procedures documented in the manual.  This is not a PHD2 problem, but from the sound of it more likely to be a PC hardware/OS issue.  One of the things you need to look at carefully is whatever power management schemes may be in use in Win 10 – Win10 is quite happy to disable USB devices at times unless you configure it otherwise. And you can’t make assumptions about the compatibility of different levels of USB ports and devices – if the device uses USB 2, you should be connecting it to a USB 2 port.  You may also need to use one of the Microsoft tools for mapping and displaying the USB subsystem so that you can then move the device from one USB controller to another or isolate it from other USB consumers.  None of the vendors are going to be able to reach out and magically fix this for you, I think you’ll have to do the dirty work yourself.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CADMTSMKqXNDi6jMdizKNDT45cdKGX3iuGWKSW5h3p0x%3DsbAZwA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Raghav Laul]

Thank you for your reply. I have already disabled the USB power management features and my laptop has 2 USB ports ive tried them both to no avail. My next question, then is, at the expense of not throwing away my USD 300+ autoguider AND considering this setup works fine on a Win 7 virtual machine running on the same laptop, will PHD guiding work accurately if I just run it on a Virtual machine and connect it to my mount or will the latencies create guiding errors?

Regards

Raghav Laul

(M) +919810561265

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/6C048F21A2694384AE1ECD85FD18A8EE%40HomeDesktop.

[Brian Valente]

Hi Raghav

many people are running PHD in a virtual environment without issues, Although I don't know if that will work for you, you certainly can try it 

I think Bruce was pointing out the camera and USB issues you have fall outside of PHD support. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CADMTSM%2BA7%3Dy1Qc-yL1qmK4dhtxA3WteP2V1b1a8gVFHiwFf%3DAw%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Brian 

Brian Valente

portfolio brianvalentephotography.com 

[Raghav Laul]

Sure. Thanks for the help

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CAJa45i4gQXSQwZQPGf%3D4JjqiPPQbw7osi5h7%2BbT_JuMd5rK0vw%40mail.gmail.com.

[bw_msgboard]

I wouldn’t expect any VM latencies to have affect guiding assuming it’s a high quality VM solutions. You should be keeping the camera exposures at 1-sec or higher for other reasons so device-level latencies become less important.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CADMTSM%2BA7%3Dy1Qc-yL1qmK4dhtxA3WteP2V1b1a8gVFHiwFf%3DAw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brian Valente]

>>> You should be keeping the camera exposures at 1-sec or higher for other reasons

just to clarify "Higher" here means "longer" - i.e., 1-5 seconds exposure. It's not recommended to guide with sub-second exposures

Brian

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/38CC0570D8CD4B51B251C2278F3EFDDE%40HomeDesktop.