PHD2 on Astroberry Keeps Disconnecting Camera...

[Ian McCallum]

I've run a new equipment profile on Astroberry, with PHD2. I've plugged in the ZWO ASI 120MM mini guide camera to the Raspberry Pi and have run the new profile wizard in PHD2. 

It detects the camera okay, but disconnects from the camera when I'm building a dark library. I'm using the default min time of 1 sec and max time of 5 secs. It seems to throw a wobbly doing the longer exposures. 

I even tried another micro SD with a fresh install of Astroberry on, but was still getting errors. 

I tested PHD2 on my laptop and it worked fine.

Any thoughts, please? 🤔

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Is this the first time with the ZWO guide camera or have you had it working previously ?

Is your imaging camera also ZWO I think certainly at one time there was an issue using two ZWO cameras that needed some sort of workaround with the drivers.

Are you using 8 bit or 16 bit in PHD2 ?

Also is the guide cam connected directly via a short USB to the Rpi or does it go through a USB hub or does it have a long usb cable ?

Steve

Edited February 2, 2022 by teoria_del_big_bang

[alacant]

1 hour ago, Ian McCallum said:

Any thoughts, please

Hi

Try the phd2 internal así driver as well as indi-asi.

But anyway, best to post the indi and phd2 logs. Then we'll have a much better chance. Otherwise, we can only guess.

Any reason you're using phd2? EKOS has en excellent guider so no need for third party apps. Keep it simple?

Cheers

Edited February 2, 2022 by alacant

[Ian McCallum]

1 hour ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Is this the first time with the ZWO guide camera or have you had it working previously ?

Is your imaging camera also ZWO I think certainly at one time there was an issue using two ZWO cameras that needed some sort of workaround with the drivers.

Are you using 8 bit or 16 bit in PHD2 ?

Also is the guide cam connected directly via a short USB to the Rpi or does it go through a USB hub or does it have a long usb cable ?

Steve

I've had it working previously, it's about a month old. I'm using 8 bit with PHD2. I've tried the half metre supplied cable, the two metre supplied one, plus one I use for charging my smartphone - all with the same results. 

I ran the dark library set up on PHD2 on my laptop, with exposure lengths from 1 second to 30 seconds - it worked fine on that! 😮

[Ian McCallum]

1 hour ago, alacant said:

Hi

Try the phd2 internal así driver as well as indi-asi.

But anyway, best to post the indi and phd2 logs. Then we'll have a much better chance. Otherwise, we can only guess.

Any reason you're using phd2? EKOS has en excellent guider so no need for third party apps. Keep it simple?

Cheers

I liked the simplicity of the layout, plus I'd used it on my laptop successfully (as in no dropped camera connections). 

[Ian McCallum]

Here's two PHD2 log files, one from the RPi and the other from my laptop...

PHD2_DebugLog_2022-02-02_112400.txt PHD2_DebugLog_2022-02-02_130836.txt

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Is camera direct to RPi then ?

And what is your Imaging camera, a long shot but if you remove that from the equation and just have the guide camera plugged in to the RPi does that work ?

Steve

Edited February 2, 2022 by teoria_del_big_bang

[Ian McCallum]

10 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Is camera direct to RPi then ?

And what is your Imaging camera, a long shot but if you remove that from the equation and just have the guide camera plugged in to the RPi does that work ?

Steve

Yes, it's plugged directly into one of the RPi's USB2 ports.  I've tried all the ports including the USB 3 ones, but still getting the same problem.  It's like PHD2 on RPi doesn't like exposure times of over 3.5 seconds. I have tried to increase the timeout timer on the advanced settings upto over a minute, but it makes no difference. I've not attached any imaging cameras at this time, only the ASI120MM mini as the guide camera.

Edited February 2, 2022 by Ian McCallum

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I know this will not help you much but just an observation.
I have compared the log files and generally all looks to be the same until it starts the 4.5 second exposures.
But my observation is that actually both the RPi and the Windows logs fail for two exposures at the start of the 4.5 second darks but the Windows seems to reconnect on the 3rd attempt where as the RPi gives up.

What does this mean, I really don't know but it seems the camera doesn't like 4.5 second exposures, or something in the software (either PHD2 or Camera driver) but windows seems to manage to reconnect okay.

Steve

[Ian McCallum]

1 minute ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

I know this will not help you much but just an observation.
I have compared the log files and generally all looks to be the same until it starts the 4.5 second exposures.
But my observation is that actually both the RPi and the Windows logs fail for two exposures at the start of the 4.5 second darks but the Windows seems to reconnect on the 3rd attempt where as the RPi gives up.

What does this mean, I really don't know but it seems the camera doesn't like 4.5 second exposures, or something in the software (either PHD2 or Camera driver) but windows seems to manage to reconnect okay.

Steve

I had noticed that it seemed to hang around the 4.5 sec mark, after repeating the test a lot of times.

[Ian McCallum]

I've posted the log up on to the PHD2 help forum, so I'll see how that goes...

[Ian McCallum]

I did a complete reinstall of Astroberry OS, last night. I did all the updates and this morning, I tried PHD2 again. 

I managed to get the dark frames library issue resolved, it seems. So, I pushed the limits a bit more and went for min and max exposure settings, with no apparent problems. 

I'll upload the log file shortly, but just the windows laptop, it did have a couple retries at 4.5 seconds. This time it did successfully reconnect to the camera without any major problems... 

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I would see if PHD2 now runs without issues.
If this is the only issue then maybe not a problem, I don't know what exposure time you normally use for guiding bit I find generally the best for me is betweem 1.5 and 4 seconds so maybe no real need to take the darks any longer than 4 seconds.

Anyway you have your darks library now that should be fine for several months now 🙂 

Steve

[Ian McCallum]

1 minute ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

I would see if PHD2 now runs without issues.
If this is the only issue then maybe not a problem, I don't know what exposure time you normally use for guiding bit I find generally the best for me is betweem 1.5 and 4 seconds so maybe no real need to take the darks any longer than 4 seconds.

Anyway you have your darks library now that should be fine for several months now 🙂 

Steve

Thanks for all the input, I was nearly starting to tear my hair out...  It's just that I like something to work either all the time or not at all (preferably the former).  If it's buggy, I like to know why and what can be done to remedy it.

I've uploaded the latest PHD2 log, for those who may want to have a look.  Perhaps it can help someone else, in the future...🤔

PHD2_DebugLog_2022-02-03_083646.txt

[Grant Fribbens]

There has been issues with frame breaking in the ASI120 series of cameras and I would probably make sure that you are using the version of firmware from the ZWO website https://download.astronomy-imaging-camera.com/download/usb-camera-windows/?wpdmdl=258.

[Ian McCallum]

2 hours ago, Grant Fribbens said:

There has been issues with frame breaking in the ASI120 series of cameras and I would probably make sure that you are using the version of firmware from the ZWO website https://download.astronomy-imaging-camera.com/download/usb-camera-windows/?wpdmdl=258.

My camera's firmware is v3, but I've already reflashed it to v3 anyway. 😉

It's only a month old and bought brand new from Auntie @FLO. 

[Grant Fribbens]

I wanted everything to run on my Raspberry Pi 4 with Astroberry but have to admit after many hours of trying I gave up as it was just not reliable enough and kept missing clear skies due to issues, so I went down the Mini PC route with Windows 10 and I am so glad I did. One of the biggest initial pulls was being able to use Sharpcap Pro for polar alignment but I use NINA and now with the Three Point Polar Alignment tool I am getting some great results and it just works how I want it to. I now have a second rig which I am still going to try and get my Pi 4 working with  

[trailer]

The RPi is very sensitive to power it's power supply I believe. I was using the Argon One V2 case with the standard RPi PSU (Astroberry, EKOS, PHD2) and was having random crashes. I noticed that the Argon case has a dedicated PSU which supplies slightly higher volts and amps. Since using this PSU I've had no crashes. I am also using the Pegasus Powerbox Advance so not powering anything directly from the RPi. Not sure if this your issue but maybe a possibility?

Edited February 4, 2022 by trailer

[Ian McCallum]

56 minutes ago, trailer said:

The RPi is very sensitive to power it's power supply I believe. I was using the Argon One V2 case with the standard RPi PSU (Astroberry, EKOS, PHD2) and was having random crashes. I noticed that the Argon case has a dedicated PSU which supplies slightly higher volts and amps. Since using this PSU I've had no crashes. I am also using the Pegasus Powerbox Advance so not powering anything directly from the RPi. Not sure if this your issue but maybe a possibility?

I'm just using the power supply that I got with it, from the Pi Hut.  It says on the box that it's the official Raspberry Pi PSU.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Ian McCallum

[trailer]

That's the same one that I was using previously too 👍