X2 drivers for Atik 3/4 series?

[mcgillca]

Hi - are there any plans to develop X2 drivers for the 3/4 series cameras?

I know that the Sky X now has ascom drivers included, but I have found these to be less reliable than the the Artemis drivers in CCDsoft.

Colin

[Chris]

The trouble is that no one ever reports errors or problems with the ASCOM drivers and as a result no alleged problems get identified or fixed.

This last happened a few months ago when there were vague comments about the drivers being slow but investigating showed that the problem only happened when the X2 to ASCOM interface was involved.  Other ways of using the ASCOM drivers had no problems.

 if you have evidence of problems then please post it, or report it to Atik support, but at the moment we have no evidence of any problems with the ASCOM camera driver.

The reason I'm responding is that I wrote the ASCOM driver for Atik.  Occasionally I touch base with Steve or Jonathan asking if there have been any problems and are told that there are none they know of.

Chris

[chrisjbaileyuk]

Chris

As the one was the one who made "vague comments" about the slow response of the Atik Ascom driver under SkyX I thought I would add to this thread.

It is undoubtedly better taking the X2 component out of the equation but there is still a hang of maybe 5-10 seconds when you exit the Ascom interface (chooser or properties). This does not happen with my Starlight Express cameras, the Atik Filter wheel or my Ascom focuser but does happen on both the 383L and 460EX. It could well be a SkyX issue but the fact that it does not happen with the Starlight Express Ascom driver suggests otherwise. The delays do not however occur in Maxim or Nebulosity which swings the compass of blame back to SkyX.

Its not a major issue as you dont need to go in to the Ascom dialogues all that often and once setup connection is pretty solid (other than the Invalid Handle error).

I think the bottom line is that as SkyX matures as a complete imaging platform it would be 'nice' to take Ascom out of the equation as much as possible. Components for which an X2 driver are available seem better integrated with no need to go into Ascom properties dialogues.

Chris

[Chris]

Thanks for the clarification Chris.  The additional detail - that it happens exiting from the Ascom chooser or properties interface - is useful information and gives me somewhere to look.

I'm a bit surprised that there could be a problem there because AFAIK it's not doing very much other than saving some information to the registry.

The Invalid Handle error should be reported to Atik Support.  This message box is generated by the low level driver.  it should not do this, but throw an exception of some sort, or return an error state.  I can then catch the error and find out what is going on.  As things are I have no information about what generates the error.  All I know is that sometimes something goes wrong somewhere.

Chris