Hi John,
first, thanks for that massive work!
I had prepared a version right after you released it, but only last night had the chance to look at it under starry skies.
Not too much to report yet, as I did not dig into the changes and new options and only used the 'classic' L1P.
One thing I noticed was on the first AF run (started manually). I got an outlier just at the proper focus position. After that, it had stopped updating the fit curve and interpolated focus position. Instead it continued further into the wing of the hyperbola (more than usual, 8 points after the min instead of typically 6), and only then plotted the fit and went to the (correct) focus position.
Cannot tell if that repeated like that in other (automatic) AF runs, in the manual run it was sort of an irritation.
All the other (automatic) runs succeeded, even one in really bad seeing conditions - likely due to the new outlier rejection. I'm sure with the old L1P it would have started another full run, here it completed with 16 points. Nice!
I got a bit irritated by the tooltips in the Assist tab, hovering over 'Help' it said it would reset stuff to defaults....
Also, a comment about the backlash compensation tooltip/help entry:
You say one should only use one of them, and set the other to zero. I disagree there, and the reason is BL accuracy and filter offsets: It is correct that for the AF run only one of them is needed, but ISTR that we agreed earlier that it does not harm to use both. The problem is that you do want to start close to focus for the AF run to succeed with high probability. The BL of my setup is 84 steps. That is about the same as the filter offset between the blue and the red channel, and almost as much as the focus range (5 times 20 steps) that I use. So IMO it is crucial that the filter offset is applied including (coarse) BL correction, and as I understand right now the only way of doing that is with the BL correction in the driver. My experience with that however is that it is not too reliable for short tunings. When I was measuring it, I did not get a mere parallelogram for the steps-vs-distance curve, it always was slowly creeping up until the linear regime started. So for AF I use the additional overdrive on top of the driver BL correction (...just like the guy wearing both belt and suspenders
)
And a question about the final point of your list: Overdrive focusing for
all focus movements. That isn't in ATM, correct? That would eventually remove the above constraint. I had wishlisted that some years ago, but got told that this would have to be in (all the) drivers, not in the general INDI code. So I'm curious how you (inted to) tackle this.
CFZ:
Very nice addition. It computes a CFZ of 13 steps for my system, and suggests to set the step width to that. I have mine set to 20 steps. Partly coming from the old 'Linear' that would do the refinement at half that step size. Do you think doing the full scan at that step size is necessary? I'd definitely have to increase the number of 'steps out', substantially increasing the time needed for an AF run. It was my feeling that about twice the CFZ is sufficient to interpolate the focus position to well within a CFZ (even more with the new weighting and outlier rejection)
Cheers,
Pit
PS: Will continue tests tonight, though only in twilight to save the moonless imaging time...