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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

trouble with eqmod mount disconnecting

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Hi,
Can you be more precise in what has happened?
Writing that a process (indi_eqmod_telescope) may damage the functioning of another process (the camera driver) is somewhat surprising.
Hopefully it did not kill the camera itself!
Jean-Luc.
5 years 11 months ago #24943

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Yeah sorry for the choice of words :) I was referring to damaging the process area in indiserver : when the eqmod driver crashes, it has a side effect which also kills the camera driver, and sometimes the indiserver too. Because driver process memory areas are somewhat independent, it means the crash in eqmod has an impact on indiserver, which in turn breaks the communication with the camera driver. I observed that the other drivers (moonlite, filter wheel sim and MGen guider) were not reacting to this. I'll admit this is quite vague and not backed up with log information. I'll double check the logs, but most often a crash was just a "died" notice unfortunately.

-Eric
5 years 11 months ago #24946

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Ok, I understand what you mean now, Concerning the indi-eqmod crash, did you use alignment ? A sequence of capture/solve/sync on the same target as ekos does may cause an issue in some circumstances. Besides I've seen in a preceding post that you leave your mount parked and powered a day long: be warned that parking the mount does not stop motor powering, there is no (direct) way to disable the driver ICs but using the power switch.
5 years 11 months ago #24968

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No I didn't use alignment. The scope being in the basement, I only ticked "Track" in Ekos for my tests.

About motor ICs remaining powered, I'm not sure I understand what your warning applies to. You mean that it could be damaging in the long term, or that it still consumes power even when parked? I plan to have a power controller in the observatory to shut down supply in some situations, but with the current code I don't think a park/unpark operation in Ekos or INDI could be linked to that control.

-Eric
5 years 11 months ago #24973

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The crash is most likely due to a memory leak I fixed earlier but Eric didn't use the fix in his branch. At least I hope this is it :D
5 years 11 months ago #24974

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I was hopeful, but last night I had it fail 3 times while guiding. I should still have logs, so will send them. Have any of the other logs been helpful @knro? Anything else I can do?

This was with kstars-bleeding-2.9.5-2.4.x86_64
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Last edit: 5 years 11 months ago by Jim. Reason: added version info
5 years 11 months ago #25545

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Send the logs anyway and I'll see if there is something of use.
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5 years 11 months ago #25546

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5 years 11 months ago #25575

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Ok, so what's happening is that if the mount fails to respond, EQMod throws an error and disconnects itself. However, this was not handled properly so it was not really disconnected as far as INDI goes. But that's only part of the issue. I updated the driver to make it more tolerant to transient errors, so it would retry the command now up to 3 times before finally giving up. It's in GIT now and should be in nightly soon, so you can give it a try.

I ran a quick test with my EQ8 and everything appeared to be in order.
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5 years 11 months ago #25587

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I hope this resolves my own issues. I have been struggling with mount disconnection for a while. It would say 'tty read failure...'
I believed there were hardware issues for longest time because it would be relatively stable indoors, but became very unreliable outdoors in the cold. So I was suspecting something temperature dependant.
5 years 11 months ago #25603

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Hi,
I'm not sure that performing retries after a disconnection is a good idea. I did not look at the driver update but having a clear disconnection in Indi is a good thing (thanks Jasem). Now I believe that the reconnection should be manual. The logs before the disconnection are not very helpful, from the driver point of view this happens in the kernel space (tty_read, tty_write). The reason may be either between the computer and the serial adapter (usb/bluetootth), between the adapter and the mount motor controllers, or in the motor controllers if there is a power glitch and they reboot. I believe that in the first case the kernel will reassign a device at the reconnection (from ttyUSB0 to ttyUSB1 for instance), in the second case there will be either read/write faliures or bad characters, and in the latter case, there will only be write failures or maybe a read timeout while the controllers are rebooting. The problem in the latter case if you automatically reconnect, is that the driver will think that the mount is uninitialized, and it will consider that it points to the Celestial Pole. The next goto may be risky in that case...
So it may be a good idea to make automatic reconnection optional, so you may disable it if you are in an automated sequence for instance. Also people reporting disconnections may try to investigate by looking the status after the disconnection: do motor controllers have rebooted? where is the serial adapter ? maybe try to speak directly with the mount using picocom to test the connectivity.
Lastly I'm thinking that power issues may eventually come from the mount capacitors, if you think that your power connection is correct. But I'm not an expert here.
Jean-Luc.
5 years 11 months ago #25618

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Thanks Jean-Luc. The retry happens immediately after an error. Disconnection only occurs if it fails 3 times. When it is disconnected, the user must manually reconnect again.
5 years 11 months ago #25619

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