PushTo direction

[admin]

Hi George,

thanks for the feedback. Definitely part of the problem is that your field of view is below the recommended minimum of 0.5 by 0.5 degrees. I would expect success rate to be dropping down quite significantly at your 0.5x0.3 degrees - maybe 60 to 70%. I can also understand why a globular cluster without much else in the frame could cause issues - so many stars of a similar brightness. In those areas you are pushing a bit beyond the design bounds of the tool, so I am not too concerned.

The freezing up is more worrying though, along with the live view lag. Those two sound related. It sounds as if the lag occurred before you tried plate solving, which would make it unrelated to the new plate solving tool. I do think one of the problems is that the plate solvind sends so many updates to the notification bar to show progress and maybe that is overloading things - I intend to limit that a bit and will see if that helps.

Can you let me know what camera you are using and what SharpCap functions (if any) you had active when you first noticed the lagging - that will help me track down possible causes.

thanks,

Robin

[Gfischer]

Robin,

My entire setup including computer is included in word file attached to previous post. I’m using an Asi183mc. The lagging happened when I opened sc and was viewing live video while adjusting focus. No other functions were running. Maybe the docx file will help.

George

[admin]

Hi George,

sorry, didn't spot that bit at the bottom of the document

There have been no significant changes for the ZWO camera support with this update. If you were using focus measurement in SharpCap then there were changes to the measurement of star position/sizes that might have had an effect, but I don't see that in the log, so if you were just judging focus by eye then that's not going to be significant.

I do see that towards the end of your log there are some 'Exposure failed' messages which detail the camera not sending SharpCap a new frame inside the allowed timeout. There are some earlier in the log too, in the 30s or so before you launched the PushTo tool. The timeout is 10s + the exposure length, so since you were using 2s exposures, you would get a delay of at least 14s between one frame and the next (12s for the timeout to happen, 2s for the retry on getting a frame to expose and complete).

I suspect that these timeouts are the most likely cause of your issue. I don't think they are likely to be related to the new version - more often these are related to USB connection issues and can be resolved either by checking/replacing cables or by reducing the 'Turbo USB' setting. Long USB cable runs often contribute to these problems.

Hope this info helps,

Robin

[Gfischer]

Robin,
Nothing changed in my hardware between the new and old sc versions. I reinstalled the previous sc version and will see if lag still exists. I’ll let you know what happens.

Thanks,
George

[Gfischer]

Robin,
Still light out here but I tested older version of sc. I hooked camera up with my normal setup. I set exposure to 2 seconds and removed dust cap and observed any lag. No lag was detected.

[admin]

Hi George,

can I just confirm which older version you have gone back to so that I can check the right range of changes to see if I can work out which might have caused something like this.

Robin

[Gfischer]

Robin,
I reverted to 4.1.11079.0

[admin]

Hi George,

OK, that was further back than I had expected - initially I was checking changes back to 4.1.11137. I have now checked back to 11079 and I am still struggling to see anything that is likely to affect the image update responsiveness if you have just opened the camera and are watching the images come in (no saving, no focus, no stacking, no pushTo, etc).

If you can provide me with a log where opening the camera and watching the frames go laggy is all you do then that would help as it leaves out all the other complex stuff that shouldn't be relevant. If you have the chance to try the intermediate builds (11126 and 11137) to see if you can narrow the problem down to appearing between one version and the next that would also help by narrowing down the search region.

cheers,

Robin

[Gfischer]

Robin,
I loaded 137 no lag. I then loaded newest version and don’t have any lag. It’s light out I’ll give it a go and let you know if I still get a lag. Maybe fresh install did something,

George

[admin]

Hi George,

the mystery deepens... Hopefully it will be OK. If not, I just found a bug in 11137 with plate solving in some circumstances which would likely cause a crash (rather than a lag). I have a fix which I will be uploading in an even newer build within the next 30 minutes or so.

cheers,

Robin