Great!

However, I guess we have two issues here: the focus module isse and the SD-card/abort exposure issue. Feels like two rather than one, the more we talk about it.

I'll be back home tomorrow for more playing with it. But of course it will be clousy as ever when you have something to test.

Magnus

I will check with my DSLR today. But I've seen a lot of posts about this, can someone summarize the issues like 1. With this option, this happens , 2. in this module, this problem happens. A direct description so when I test later today I know what to look for. From the posts I understand that saving to RAM does not work and abort exposure prevents future exposures.

Hi!

An attempt at summary of the abort exposure problem (not the focus module problem):

1. With setting "save to RAM", aborting an exposure leads to the camera being occupied, and not responding to subsequent capture attempts. This in turn stalls the whole process, scheduler not reporting it as error (at least not always) and therefor not (always) parking as it should.
(I am not totally sure about when aborting exposure could occur in a scheduled operation. I have at least one experience of it happening, due to failed autoguiding. Then autoguiding was resumed, but capture could not resume for 4 hours until I woke up).

2. With setting "save to SD-card", aborting leads to camera occupied for a few seconds, then subsequent capture works nicely. However, risk of SD-card filling up during the night.

Magnus

Thanks for looking into it, you must be getting tired of these things at some point.

The really consistent part for me was;
- Setting to save to RAM, works manually, but during the focus routine the second picture always fails as it reports to be busy.

Thanks, Vincent

Hi!

Just had a chance to experiment a bit, before clouds gather here. I tested focusing, trying to reproduce the focus module issue of error messages about "cannot abort".

And I have two instances of the "Can not abort" issue. It does not happen every time for me, it seems more intermittent. Attached is a log file, where just at the end, there is one of these "Can not abort"-messages, and there should be another somewhat earlier on. I hope it is of any use.

Magnus

So I tried a few more things and paid some closer attention. I'm setting the camera to save to RAM, the directory to my local Pictures folder on the Pi and destination is local only. That works, manually, as many times as I want within the direct INDI control panel. When I switch to Ekos and the focus module, I click autofocus, first picture is fine and location is local only, but I notice it changes the setting to client only for the second picture and it doesn't work anymore (busy) and I see on the camera itself it's been set into recording mode (whatever that means) and is waiting. It's very reproducable.

If I then go to the INDI panel, manually taking a picture also fails. I hit abort, go to the location setting and set it back to local and presto, it works again and saves the image to disk.

This is the log for the camera where I took the manual shots that worked, few posts above is a log of the failure;

Autofocus always changed mode to CLIENT when it captures. If it was set to LOCAL before, it will fallback to it once capture is complete.

So with my 600D, I wasn't able to reproduce the problem when selecting "RAM" option. It just works in Capture & AutoFocus without any issues. At any rate, as a workaround, I added an option "SD Image", which has 2 options Save & Delete. It defaults to save. If you do not want your SD card to fill up, just select "Delete". This will make it use SD Card capture target, but deletes the file afterwards. Not sure if this will help with the problems above, so give it a try and let me know. Should be in PPA tomorrow.

So what is the exact difference between client and local when I'm running the INDI server and EKOS on the same machine? And why would that make it work in my case, does that make sense maybe if something is not set up right?

Thanks for testing, I'll try that option for sure, but SD card saving didn't work properly for me unfortunately. So will look into that as well.

If you're running it on the SAME machine, don't use local!! Local is to be used when you are operating a remote INDI server AND you want to save the images on the remote INDI server. For example, if you running INDI server on a remote RPI3 and Ekos on your PC, and you want all the images to be saved on the RPI3, then you use "Local".

Hi!

I'm going to test your new SD-card option today and get back with reports on that. But is it then correct that cannot reproduces the focus module "already exposing, cannot abort" problem? Could you make any sense of the logfile I posted?

Any ideas of what I could test to be any wiser about it? While the SD-card/RAM issue is easy to test during daytome, the focus requires a star ... but good to know what to do next time the coulds part.

Magnus

Maybe use artificial star for day-time? I wasn't able to get any unjustified "aborts" in my testing today. Will try later with my observatory.

Hi!

The new feature, Delete from SD-card, seems to work nicely here. Pictures are taken and immediately deleted. And the problem with hanging on abort is solved in this way. with the camera set to save on SD-card and delete from SD-card, I can abort exposures and then almost immediately capture again. Nice!!

The focus problem however, is still here. The error message I get is not about "busy" but "GPhoto driver is already exposing. Can not abort".And when this happens, the camera just takes a quick snapshot - even though I have it set to 5 secs, it just snaps a picture, as it it was less then 1 sec, and then gives this error msg. And then stalls - nothing more happens until I intervene manually. Attached is a log file where this happens in the end. It is very intermittent, I could focus a number of times before it happened tonight - but then there it is.

Hope this is useful.

Magnus