I am having curious (buggy) issues with cooling an ASI071MC - which may or may not be associated with updating to 2.3.5.
When I connect setup, either manually or via dragscript, the camera cools to the target temp (-10°). This works fine.
However, if I run the command to cool in a dragscript, before the camera has reached the target temperature the cooling “hangs”. The cooler power may stop climbing at 0%, 6%, 19% or 26% (these are the numbers I have noticed, it probably is a random point). It then times out after 7 min (the default timeout setting in the setup).
To test what is going on I created two test dragscripts - the first connects, then waits 20 minutes then executes the cooling command - OK. the second connects, executes the cooling command then waits 20 minutes - stuck at some % power.
This all seems to be new - it was working in January, hence my suspicion it is related to the update.
Any ideas?
Andrew
PS - in working through this I realised I don’t understand the cooling commands well. There are three points where the cooling commands are executed - on connect, on the dragscript command “cooling down” and in the sequence itself. Am I correct? What is the logic?
The first question is always going to be to check if you are using the “Up to the minute” current ASI driver. I had some similar behaviour a long while ago but have not seen it in at least the last year or so. My setup had changed a couple of times so I have always tended to be on the bleeding edge with drivers.
Regards the various cooling commands, the answer there is that you could use any, all or none of those depending on the situation. I don’t cool the camera on connection, the ASI driver/firmware switches the cooling of when the driver is connected so with “Cool on connection” if you have to connect and disconnect then reconnect, it switches the cooler off and restarts from 0% power every time you connect. A friends QSI CCS behaves in a much more sensible way IMO, if you cool it down, it stays there until it is commanded differently or power cycled, no matter if you disconnect and reconnect it, it stays at the previous setpoint.
I generally cool the camera manually when I am happy everything is ready to go but I have my dragscript set up to cool the camera 20 minutes before astro dark in case I forget. The in sequence cooling just becomes a cooling check at that point.
Nothing is related to version of Voyager Andrew, we do not change anything about since 3 years.
Be sure to not use the V2 version of ASI direct driver in Voyager with this old camera.
I suggest to use “Leave Unchanged” in connect of camera to avoid problems like yours. In sequence is always to use or the temperature will be not managed in Sequence. In DragScript if you want to do a pre cooling.
I’ve had a few odd issues where despite being set to “Off” or “Warmup” after a night of imaging the camera remains at an odd temperature somewhere between -10 (set point) and ambient, typically around 5C - neither cooled nor warmed up (the fans can be heard running too).
It seems to have something to do with repetitively “stacking” cooling commands on top of each other, I am assuming the ASI driver gets confused and is left in some indeterminate state.
The only way I’ve found to clear it is to Disconnect and Reconnect Voyager which seems to reset the camera/driver.
The cooling management system has been the same for all drivers and has been the same for a decade and does not depend on the camera model/brand.
The ramps are performed by setting the temperature and it is a normal thing, it is not a strange, absurd or dangerous operation. This is normal on all ramps and all caeras behave properly.
The same ASI brand has hundreds of users in Voyager and only a few report (3-4) this problem so I would go to make sure of the drivers installed in Windows for the camera (which are not the Voyager drivers and the SDK but they are the drivers / camera firmware to be managed outside of Voyager) Or I would look at the power supply.
If you think the problem is the ramps for the firmware / driver version you want to use, do not use the ramps but simply set a final temperature also for the warmup, do it manually or with dragscript or in Sequence. For warmup with a cooling set at + 20 ° that does not ramp.
After this checks, please contact the ASI support who may be able to verify the problems and correct (if this has not already been done).
Voyager does not provide support for cameras and their drivers, it would not be correct and it is not our job.