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Trouble with Ekos

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Trouble with Ekos was created by Brian

Trouble with Ekos:

This past weekend I had a full night to try out an imaging run with KStars/Ekos/Indi on Ubuntu 17.04. While I did get a good number of Images I also had a fair number of issues. I unfortunately only had the logs set to normal instead of verbose, but I'll attach them anyway. The main problems I ran into (in increasing severity) were:

### Polar Alignment

Once I got all the astrometry.net index files installed and the local solver working this actually works fairly fast. Unfortunately, it does not seem very reliable. I could probably create a separate topic just for polar alignment, so I'll just breifly mention that (1) running it multiple times produces different results, and (2) it doesn't seem like it rotates the mount correctly (at least not how I am expecting).

While an inconvinence, this didn't really hinder the imaging session.

### Guide Camera Driver (QHY5)

I have a SSAG guidecam and it uses the QHY5 indi driver. For the most part this works fine, but I am constantly having to disconnect/reconnect it from the indi control panel. Any time an image capture is stopped/canceled (which happens every time a 'looping' mode is stopped), the connection to the camera breaks any any attempt to capture an image after that results in an error until it is reconnected.

While annoying, this also isn't a show-stopper, although I suspect if I was using a headless indi server remotely this might be more trouble.


### Guiding

I haven't been able to get guiding to work in Ekos yet. I don't really understand the settings, so I left them at default and just tried to calibrate, but it always fails. Maybe if there were a tutorial on this type of thing I could get it working, but for now I just open up PHD2 and guide in that (connecting through indi server).

This works fine but it doesn't allow dithering. Last night I tried a quick setup in my backyard so I could test the "external guiding" setting in Ekos and enable dithering. It worked successfully for the first couple of images, then one of the dithers failed with "timeout waiting for settle" and the image captures just continued without dithering. I aborted the run, and disconnected/reconnected to the guider, but after that happened it never dithered again (even though it would say that it WAS dithering).

This is a bigger hangup as my DSLR has a lot of pattern noise that shows up after stacking.

### Crashing

During both the weekend run and last night's run I was unable to complete a full sequence. Most of the times the image capture will just stop and hang, a couple times it showed a popup saying the indi server crashed. Once, KStars itself crashed.


### Misc

The last thing that makes using Ekos difficult is the fact that any changes/settings in the Ekos/Indi control panels don't seem to persist. When I disconnect/reconnect indi (which I have to do quite a bit), all my setup sequences, settings, etc get reset to the defaults. It would be very helpful if these settings just persisted to whatever you set them last.


I use the bleeding edge ppa so I know things change fairly frequently, but I am surprised I am having so much trouble getting a full run to go smoothly. Maybe I have a particularly odd setup or am doing something wrong?

My setup is:

Canon 650D on a Celestron AVX with a SSAG guider.
6 years 5 months ago #20464
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Replied by Rob Lancaster on topic Trouble with Ekos

Hi Bj0,

I can't speak to the polar alignment routine since I have not used it myself. I set up my equipment in different places every time. Jasem can help you more with that since he wrote the routine.

For the SSAG, I was imaging with someone who has exactly this camera connected to his Raspberry Pi last night and last week as well. I believe in all of that time, we just had to reconnect the SSAG just once. His is in fact a headless setup you can access with vnc. But we didn't need to do that. all we had to do, was go into the INDI control panel on his windows laptop and disconnect and reconnect the SSAG

For Guiding, I don't see enough information to see what might be the trouble. A screenshot or list of your settings would help. As long as the star/mount moved in response to the guide commands it should not fail. I have used this many times with different scopes and cameras. One thing that might be the culprit though. What did you set the guiding commands to be sent with, the SSAG port, the Mount, or something else? If you planned to use the mount commands, but selected the auto guider port in the guide module and then did not plug in a cable, the commands could be going to an unused port. But that is a guess.

For the settings, there are many many settings that are persistent between sessions as long as you connect, set them and disconnect successfully. If you had a crash during your session, perhaps they did not get saved. The sequences can be saved by just clicking the save button as well. So my recommendation would be to connect, set everything the way you want it, save your sequences, etc. Then shut down, while avoiding any crashes, and see what doesn't get saved. Shouldn't be too much, and even better, if you do get a crash, at least your settings are now more correct.\

Thanks,

Rob
6 years 5 months ago #20466

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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic Trouble with Ekos

From the logs, looks like there was intermittent communication issues with your mount. did the perhaps came a bit loose during the rotation? I also see that you started guiding from PHD2 while still doing polar alignment
6 years 5 months ago #20468

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Replied by Brian on topic Trouble with Ekos

I'm not sure about loose connections, I didn't touch the cables after setting up and after restarting it would work again for a while. If that's the cause than it is probably the actually camera port that isn't tight enough and other than trying to tape the cable to the camera I'm not sure how to test that out.

I use PHD2's looping mode when setting up, but I don't turn on guiding until after everything is aligned and then I slew to the target. Polar alignment will not even work while guiding (when both applications try to use the camera at the same time it starts giving errors and I have to disconnect/reconnect the SSAG. This often crashes PHD)
Last edit: 6 years 5 months ago by Brian.
6 years 5 months ago #20472

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Replied by Brian on topic Trouble with Ekos

Rob,
Thanks for the reply. The problem requiring disconnect/reconnect happens literally every time I use looping mode and then stop it.

For guiding, like I said I just left everything the default because I wasn't sure what any of the settings meant. Next time I try I'll see if I can specify guiding through mount (since it is working with PHD2 through indi, I thought that much would already be configured). I don't plug anything in the guider port, I'm always guiding through mount commands.
6 years 5 months ago #20473

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Replied by Kalle on topic Trouble with Ekos

Hello,

I'm facing similar problems with my ALCCD5 (should be the same camera as QHY5). When I'm using focuser tab "Framing" or guiding tab "Looping" it always breaks at some point giving GetQHYCCDSingleFrame error (-1). Intresting thing here is that camera works perfecly on CCD sequence queue tab with similar sequences.

I have tested this with the latest master branch and with tag v17.08.2.

This is debug log from the guiding tab looping:
2017-10-29T14:46:38: [ERROR] GetQHYCCDSingleFrame error (-1) 
2017-10-29T14:46:38: [DEBUG] Blocking read call finished. 
2017-10-29T14:46:38: [DEBUG] Blocking read call. 
2017-10-29T14:46:38: [DEBUG] Exposure done, downloading image... 
2017-10-29T14:46:37: [DEBUG] Exposure in progress: Time left 1 
2017-10-29T14:46:36: [DEBUG] Taking a 3 seconds frame... 
2017-10-29T14:46:36: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDResolution camroix 0 camroiy 0 camroiwidth 1280 camroiheight 1024 
2017-10-29T14:46:36: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDBinMode (1x1). Software binning (2x2) 
2017-10-29T14:46:36: [DEBUG] Current exposure time is 3000000.000000 us 
2017-10-29T14:46:25: [ERROR] GetQHYCCDSingleFrame error (-1) 
2017-10-29T14:46:25: [DEBUG] Blocking read call finished. 
2017-10-29T14:46:25: [DEBUG] Blocking read call. 
2017-10-29T14:46:25: [DEBUG] Exposure done, downloading image... 
2017-10-29T14:46:24: [DEBUG] Exposure in progress: Time left 1 
2017-10-29T14:46:23: [DEBUG] Taking a 3 seconds frame... 
2017-10-29T14:46:23: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDResolution camroix 0 camroiy 0 camroiwidth 1280 camroiheight 1024 
2017-10-29T14:46:23: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDBinMode (1x1). Software binning (2x2) 
2017-10-29T14:46:23: [DEBUG] Current exposure time is 3000000.000000 us

Debug from the similar sequence:
2017-10-29T14:43:02: [DEBUG] Upload complete 
2017-10-29T14:43:02: [DEBUG] Uploading file. Ext: fits, Size: 331200, sendImage? Yes, saveImage? No 
2017-10-29T14:43:02: [DEBUG] Download complete. 
2017-10-29T14:43:02: [DEBUG] Blocking read call finished. 
2017-10-29T14:43:01: [DEBUG] Blocking read call. 
2017-10-29T14:43:01: [DEBUG] Exposure done, downloading image... 
2017-10-29T14:43:00: [DEBUG] Exposure in progress: Time left 1 
2017-10-29T14:42:59: [DEBUG] Taking a 3 seconds frame... 
2017-10-29T14:42:59: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDResolution camroix 0 camroiy 0 camroiwidth 1280 camroiheight 1024 
2017-10-29T14:42:59: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDBinMode (1x1). Software binning (2x2) 
2017-10-29T14:42:59: [DEBUG] Current exposure time is 3000000.000000 us 
2017-10-29T14:42:59: [DEBUG] Upload complete 
2017-10-29T14:42:58: [DEBUG] Uploading file. Ext: fits, Size: 331200, sendImage? Yes, saveImage? No 
2017-10-29T14:42:58: [DEBUG] Download complete. 
2017-10-29T14:42:58: [DEBUG] Blocking read call finished. 
2017-10-29T14:42:57: [DEBUG] Blocking read call. 
2017-10-29T14:42:57: [DEBUG] Exposure done, downloading image... 
2017-10-29T14:42:56: [DEBUG] Exposure in progress: Time left 1 
2017-10-29T14:42:55: [DEBUG] Taking a 3 seconds frame... 
2017-10-29T14:42:55: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDResolution camroix 0 camroiy 0 camroiwidth 1280 camroiheight 1024 
2017-10-29T14:42:55: [DEBUG] SetQHYCCDBinMode (1x1). Software binning (2x2) 
2017-10-29T14:42:55: [DEBUG] Current exposure time is 3000000.000000 us
6 years 4 months ago #20508

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I hope I'm not sounding like a scratched record here, but regarding the QHY5 driver and cam... not worth the hassle. I've been having those exact same issues for over a year and never got it solved. Seems an issue with the driver that only QHY can solve and doesn't. I switched camera's all together and this annoyance is gone.
6 years 4 months ago #20538

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Replied by Greg on topic Trouble with Ekos

Yes I think I can corroborate the problem with PA. I noticed that if I did successive PAs, I had a lot of re-adjusting each time, to the point that I think successive PA attempts were just undoing previous ones. But if I returned the scope to park and then did a follow-up PA, things were working smoothly and I was able to converge the PA.
6 years 4 months ago #20543

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Ah funny, I do exactly the same. Not sure even why now, but I guess I used to have weird results when not restarting from scratch. No problem for me though, adjusting once usually gets it right in 1 go, with a park and restart for the final adjustment till 15" or so.
6 years 4 months ago #20544

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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic Trouble with Ekos

I'm in communication with QHY and hopefully we get more updates soon.
6 years 4 months ago #20622

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Replied by Mike Jaquays on topic Trouble with Ekos

Any update on this issue? I'm seeing the exact same issues with my QHY guide cameras as well.
6 years 4 months ago #21002

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Replied by Jasem Mutlaq on topic Trouble with Ekos

They didn't give any time, but I think with a couple of week they will release an updated SDK.
6 years 4 months ago #21004

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