Atik Ascom Server had to close

[mcgillca]

Hi - I recently (mistakenly?) upgraded  to Ascom 6.1SP1.

Since then, I've had intermittent problems with using my Atik 314L+ and 460ex with The Sky X (I use the 314L+ as the guider, 460ex as the imaging camera).

I get a message saying something like "The Atik Ascom Server had to close", and TSX hangs in mid-exposure.

I normally use CCDCommander and FOCUSMAX 4 as well, so repeated this just within TSX by taking a series of images.

I turned on the trace, so have the logs - they are too big to post, but could put them in a drop box, but I can't see any problems, the logs from both cameras just stop at the same time (presumably when the Ascom server crashes). Enclosed the top and tail of the 460ex file.

I have tried with just using the ATIK driver in TSX, but could not replicate the problem. I would rather use the ASCOM drivers if I can, since I can specify which camera is the main camera, which the guider. If I use the ATIK driver in TSX, I have to remember to start the autoguider first, or I get the cameras connected the wrong way round!

I have run the Ascom diagnostics, but the only errors are related to the Feathertouch focusser, nothing else.

I'm using build 9240 of TSX on a Window's 7 machine.

Any thoughts?

Colin

[Chris]

I've replied to Colin's post about this on the Software Bisque forum, mostly asking for the full logs.

One thing I did find is that the Software Bisque code checks that an exposure has finished is done by calling the CameraState property as fast as possible, I'm seeing something like three or four thousand times a second using a simulator.
With the Atik driver each of those calls will call the ArtemisCameraState function.  That could be putting quite a lot of strain on the various layers of the driver.

Chris

[Chris]

We have been carrying on with this on the Software Bisque (SB) forum. I thought that an update may be useful for those who can't stand the excitement of the SB forum.

I've not been able to do a lot of testing with the Atik camera driver but have been testing with a guide camera simulator and there are things that concern me about how SB handle external devices.

• The most obvious one is that when TheSkyX (TSX) is waiting for an exposure to finish it is polling the driver for the camera status as fast as it can.  I've seen rates of 10,000 times a second.
• These calls are directed to the low level Atik driver and if there is any tiny window where things could go wrong this will hit it.
• This could be more likely when there are two cameras using the same driver code.
• These continuous calls consume a lot of resources, I've seen it take over 25% of a 4 core system. Still it avoids having to need to install a heater in the observatory.

The Bisques claim this is "by design". I'm not convinced, it looks more like "by accident but we're not admitting it".  It's pretty obvious that there's no help coming from SB.  No surprise there.

I'm hoping that Colin can come up with more information, in particular by using PHD2 for guiding.  This doesn't try polling the driver thousands of times a second.

My tentative plan is to add throttling to the ASCOM driver so that the commands that are being called frequently are held in the driver and the low level driver and hardware are only polled relatively infrequently.

First I have to dismantle my laptop and clean the dust out of the heat sink.  At present if it's running TSX it overheats and shuts down after about 20 minutes.

Chris