Intermittent error when live stacking

[Ralf]

I have used Livestack for over 5 years now and have recently run into a frustrating problem.
Every now and again, the Livestack stops accumulating frames. It happens at any time - after 11 frames recently and last night after 21 frames. There is no sign anything is wrong - the counter at the bottom counts down the exposure and at the end, it just goes back to zero and starts again, but no frame has been saved.
When this happens, I just clear the stack and sometimes this helps, but other times it just doesn't do anything and after waiting for my 3 minutes (my typical exposure) it just doesn't save a frame. Last night, the only thing I could do was go into the camera section, delete the ASI 071, and then reselect it again. That seemed to solve the problem and it starts off as a new stack.
For your info, I use the 64 bit version.
Is there something I can do to solve this problem as it is quite frustrating to check after half an hour and find that the counter is at the same number of frames as when you checked it last.

[Menno555]

Hello and welcome

Could you please share a log file from such a session? It makes it easier to check.
You can find it under the tab Help and there Show Log. There you can choose to locate that log on disk (the shown warning you can just ignore and click Ok).
When sharing it's preferred to attach it as a file instead of pasting the text as answer.

Menno

[admin]

Hi,

yes, a log would be really helpful in narrowing down the possible causes.

One thing to know is that if the count of frames in the bottom left stops going up then that indicates that SharpCap is not receiving frames from the camera. That may also be associated with the 'dropped' frame count in the same area going up.

If the frame count bottom left is going up, but the live stack count is *not* going up then the frames are coming from the camera but not being added by live stacking - we will need to investigate different things if that's the case.

thanks,

Robin

[Ralf]

Thanks Robin,
The missed frame count does not show anything - it shows zero.
I have attached the file for the run.
It stops at frame number 11 at 21.23
I should have mentioned that I use the SkyX, with an ascom program that links the mount (Paramount ME), Sharpcap and the SkyX.

[admin]

Hi Ralf,

thanks for the log - it looks like the camera stopped delivering frames to the PC at that point (about 21:23). Before that we can see in the log...

Code: Select all

Debug  	21:23:05.693524	#29	Finished ZWO Exposure of 180000ms, gotFrame = True			

but after the dither that comes next, we see

Code: Select all

Debug  	21:23:19.730346	#29	Starting ZWO Exposure of 180000ms																						in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Warning	21:26:21.966537	#29	Fetching still frame from ZWO camera failed with ExpFailed, exposure is 180000, timeout is 209000						in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug  	21:26:21.966791	#29	Finished ZWO Exposure of 180000ms, gotFrame = False			

Basically, the camera doesn't deliver the frame to SharpCap, and SharpCap times out (having waited about an extra 30s beyond the 180s exposure). That then repeats.

Now what is interesting is that it looks like the camera recovers when you close and re-open it at 22:06 or so. Did you unplug the camera at that point or just close/reopen from SharpCap. I have seen situations like this before, but in general they seem to require an unplug/replug of the camera to recover, so a software attempt to recover automatically isn't useful. If your situation recovered just on a close/reopen then that might indicate I could write some code to try to auto recover in this situation.

cheers,

Robin

[Ralf]

Hi Robin,
What I did at about 22.06 was to go to the menu section, deselect the ASI 071 (I have an ASI 020 as a guide camera), so 2 cameras show up in the menu. The screen goes blank and then I reselect the ASI 071 and start again. I didn't close down Sharpcap or unplug the camera.
It took a few minutes for the temperature to get back to -10 degrees Celsius, but that is not a problem.
Cheers,
Ralf

[admin]

Hi Ralf,

thanks for confirming - I will try to design some code that could detect this and automatically recover. Unfortunately hard to test because I can't make the camera stop responding this way 'on demand', so I will have to have a first go and then wait for any feedback as to whether it helps or not.

cheers,

Robin

[Ralf]

Hi Robin,
Will that come out as a new version at a later date?
I'll keep trying the update button to see when a new version is available.
Thanks for your help.
Cheers,
Ralf

[admin]

Hi Ralf,

yes, it will come as a new version, probably in a few weeks. Keep an eye on the downloads page, as the auto-update version always lags behind the latest download (this is deliberate to avoid putting a brand new version that might have new bugs up for auto-update).

cheers,

Robin