Hello,
I've been using Scheduler lately and it's been working really good for mosaics and single targets.

Last and this night I had a strange problem.
I set a single target in Scheduler with a fits file as the reference for target.
Everything worked well except the files captured were binned 2x2.
CCD/Capture module was showing 1x1 but still it was capturing 2x2 until the Scheduler was stopped/restarted.

Oh.. And the target drift feature didn't work until it switched to 1x1 bin.

This happened yesterday and same happened tonight...
18x360s frames were screwed in this way.
APP still stacks them just fine with the good ones (1x1) so maybe it's not a total loss.

Attaching log. The change from 2x2 to 1x1 happened after the 8th frame.

Thanks!

Tonight, started everything up - same scheduler file, same sequence file.
I was expecting 2x2 binning again but no... everything went without a problem.
Then, for some reason Ekos lost connection to the mount.
Rebooted the system, restarted the scheduler - all was OK again.

Really puzzling why it was doing this 2x2 binning thing two nights in a row...

Sorry, it is still happening.

Started up tonight with a new target in scheduler.
All was fine.
Right after meridian flip KStars crashed.
Rebooted and restarted the schedule.
2x2 bin again!
Restarted the schedule.
2x2 bin again!
Restarted the schedule one more time.
Finally it's back to 1x1...

What's going on?

BTW, the server is Stellarmate X latest stable on MeLe, the client is KStars Windows beta from August 22.

Thanks!

It's doing this again and again...
This night I wasted another hour before I noticed it is taking 2x2 images...

Why, why it never did this before and all of a sudden started doing this?

What I just found - if before starting the real job/schedule I start and stop a capture in CCD/Capture module, this reliably (?) triggers 1x1 mode.

more questions than answers. I notice on my Nikon DSLR driver interface, that Binning is an option at the driver level. I haven't looked at the code, but if it were set to 2x I'm not sure if that overrides some specific modules or whether they update this value. I take it your driver doesn't have binning set to 2x?

Max,
this problem has been reported recently, but we could not track it down what it causes. In the latest build, logging has been improved so that we could narrow the problem down. Would it be possible to use one of the latest nightly builds for the KStars client?

- Wolfgang

… and please share your scheduler and sequence files.

Wolfgang,
The latest build I tried was kstars-master-1616-windows.
That didn't work well with respect to frequent cases of 2x2 binning.
Also DSS overlay didn't work (grayed out).

The latest build on binary-factory now is kstars-master-1619-windows.
I'll give it a try tonight.

Thanks Max, please share the logs and both scheduler and capture sequence files you are using.

Just an idea: I would try to minimize the number of captures defined in the capture sequence and would increase the repeats in the scheduler accordingly. This might increase the chance that the binning is at least correct after several frames. But as long as we don't know what creates this fault, its just an educated guess...

- Wolfgang

I tried kstars-master-1619 (Build: 2023-09-17T08:22:23Z).
It started capturing at 1x1 right away. This is good.

Problems:
Still no DSS overlays.

It started capturing images as "ngc7479_Light_120_secs_xxx". < this is how it should be.
Captured just 3 images and stopped (guiding was still running).

I restarted the scheduler. This time it started capturing images as "NGC_7479_Light_120_secs_xxx".
Captured just 4 images and stopped (guiding was still running).

I reverted back to latest Stable - all is good.
Scheduler continues capturing images as "ngc7479_Light_120_secs_xxx".

Please keep an eye on it. I would be surprised if the root cause has been fixed. But nevertheless good to hear that it works for you.

I took a closer look at our log file. It seems _sometimes_ when the capture sequence gets loaded, the binning isn't used from the file but it uses the setting from the alignment (or focus) process before. The only explanation for this is a concurrency issue, but I'm not really sure. It's remains under investigation...

- Wolfgang

I have recently observed instances of settings from my primary camera (gain, offset, and binning) propagating to my secondary guide camera. I wonder if this is related to that. Are other settings changed or just binning?