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ZWO ASI224MC Exposure Timeout inital troubleshooting

  • Posts: 30
  • Thank you received: 26
Hi Folks,
I have a ZWO ASI224MC connected to a pi-ish device (NanoPi K2), running UbuntuMate with full install of Kstars.
All was OK until last weekend when I did an apt update/upgrade on the unit. One of the updates seems to have affected the cameras performance in indi.
Now I'm getting exposure timeouts after the 2nd or 3rd or so frame (sometimes 1st fails). This is from the indi control panel, not just Ekos.
I will spend some time on the weekend testing the camera on another system (to rule out hw fault) and reloading the pi from a backup to see what differences are made.

Is there a basic troubleshooting guide someone could suggest before I capture and submit logs?
In additional to the logs is there other info you'd recommend I grab for the system?

Cheers.
Also - I'm new to this forum, is it best practice to come back and edit this post, or post a new topic once I'm armed with logs after preliminary troubleshooting?
6 years 4 months ago #20791

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ZWO ASI camera driver was not updated for a while so no changes were made. For logs, check my signature on how to submit them. Just submit them as a reply to this topic.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Noel
6 years 4 months ago #20795

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  • Posts: 30
  • Thank you received: 26
tl;dr > I traced the problem to a low quality power cable providing insufficient power to the pi.

For the benefit of others, this is what I found in my log files. I only had the ASI224MC connected to my NanoPi K2 running latest Ubuntu Mate 16.04, indi & kstars.
org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO CCD ASI224MC : "[DEBUG] StartExposure->setexp : 1.000s "
org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO CCD ASI224MC : "[DEBUG] ASIGetExpStatus failed (0). Restarting exposure... "

I first tested the ASI224MC on Windows PC with sharpcap and drivers from ZWO; all worked well. I knew the camera was fine.
I then installed latest indi & kstars on an old PC running Ubuntu Mate 16.04; all worked well. I knew indi & kstars were OK, well at least the x86 builds.
I then focused on the pi. I had a backup of the SD card from August when the install was fresh and 'known working'. I backed up my SD's current image and reloaded the one from August. It also failed the same way with exposure timeouts; my 'known good' image hadn't yet been updated so I started to suspect a hardware issue with the pi.
My next step was going to be to borrow a 'genuine' raspberry pi 3 b board from my media player and try a fresh install from scratch on that.
I stuck a thumb drive in to backup some custom scripts and noticed the unit powered itself off while copying. I wondered about load on the USB ports then remembered after I last updated the unit (it normally lives offline) I'd swapped the USB power cable with a longer one when shifting some gear around.

I put the original power cable back on the unit and everything started to work 100%, even with mount and DSLR connected.

In the end it was a hardware fault I'd caused by using a bad power cable (now in the bin) and nothing at all wrong with indi, kstars, the computer or camera.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq
6 years 4 months ago #20840

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You can excellent troubleshooting skills! Glad it's working again for you!
6 years 4 months ago #20841

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