Hi, my 20D can't do exposures >30s anymore. When I attempt a 60s exposure the shutter closes after 30s. Then nothing happens for another 30s and after that the frame is downloaded and shown in Fitsviewer. The 20D's dials had been set to "M" and "bulb". Build: 2018-11-15T10:52:54Z

The logfile shows:

[2018-11-19T17:36:19.097 CET DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - Canon DSLR EOS 20D (normal mode) : "[DEBUG] Finding optimal exposure setting for 60 seconds in shutterspeed (count=56)... "
[2018-11-19T17:36:19.097 CET DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - Canon DSLR EOS 20D (normal mode) : "[DEBUG] 0 sBest match: 3econds Index: 1 "
[2018-11-19T17:36:19.097 CET DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - Canon DSLR EOS 20D (normal mode) : "[DEBUG] Setting radio/menu widget shutterspeed: 1 (30) "

Obviously shutter speed "BULB" should have been selected instead of 30s. The "force bulb" enabled or disabled setting has no effect on this.

dont think its this as you were already working but check your "noise reduction" setting on your camera (if the 20d has that setting my 100d did ) and turn it off and try again. Worth a look

Shouldn't shooting mode should be BULB instead of MANUAL?

The 20D has no "bulb" position in the main dial. One has to choose "M" there and then select BULB from within the manual mode.

Thanks for your suggestion, stash. The 20D has a mirror lock function and it was turned off.

It was not the Mirror Lock function that caused my problem it was the the setting in the camera "Long Exposure Noise Reduction" although connected to "Mirror Lock" the latter wasn't the problem it was the setting to on of "Long Exposure Noise Reduction" in camera setting. Anyway hope they sort it

I've been staring at the gphoto_driver.cpp code for a couple hours yet I am not able to fully understand what is being done. My understanding of the code is too poor, I have to look up almost everything and the numerous widgets confuse me. What I gathered though is the impression that much effort is being done towards dealing with a *lot* of cameras in one driver. It is also my impression that changing the code while adding support for additional cameras can lead to other cameras that had been working before, "falling off the cliff". I know my 20d had been working well some time ago but now it is almost useless as it can no longer shoot in bulb mode. Same goes for the QHY5 that did work OK years ago when it had its own driver called "QHY-old". At some point this driver was removed and one driver for all QHY cams was introduced which lead to several malfunctions in the QHY5 that never were ironed out.

I believe issues like this could be largely avoided if the "one driver fits all" philosophy was dropped. We could have one driver for a certain set of cameras that operate in the same way. Such drivers would be smaller and easier to maintain. I would be perfectly happy with a very small driver for the 20d that I could keep as long as I continue to own this camera.

You know which version in GIT worked out for you? We can then do a git bisect and find out the offending commit and fix it from there.

Unfortunately I don't. I stopped using the 20d when I got a 5D many months ago. I re-activated the 20d after I had flooded the 5D while doing under water photography. That's when I realized it doesn't work as it used to. So the time frame for the offending commit could be as much as two years.

I added a few lines to the code for additional comments to be written to the logfile in order to find out what parts of the code are used and where it goes wrong (I did not succeed though). This is where the (2) in "Exposure started. (2)" in the log file comes from. It tells me line 1245 is used (gphoto->command = DSLR_CMD_CAPTURE). I believe DSLR_CMD_BULB_CAPTURE in line 1174 should be used instead but there was no way for me to find out why it was arriving at one instead of the other. I guess this code is not exactly well suited for a bloody beginner like me to start with.

Have you tried forcing BLOB in options? It's a setting that I recently added.

Yes. I tried both, with and without force bulb enabled. (I assume BLOB means bulb?)

[2018-12-13T00:15:25.449 CET INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - Canon DSLR EOS 20D (normal mode) : "[INFO] Force BULB is enabled. All expsures shall be captured in BULB mode except for subsecond captures. "

Thanks, so after I checked the logs and the code, the issue that no BULB widget is found for your camera. Try to list all the widgets reported by your camera using gphoto2, if you have neither eosremoterelease nor bulb then there is no bulb support. Unless you have an external shutter port (or DSUSB), then there is no way for the driver to trigger bulb exposure. If this worked before, I don't know how it did.

The shutterspeed exposure widget property includes bulb, but even if this is set, we need a way to trigger the exposure which is what the bulb widget is for.