Sorry Jasem,

I spoke to soon. After letting the guide camera run for a longer period. I get the exposure time outs again. The camera does recover though. See the screenshot below. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.

  

Hmmm odd.. I actually let this go for 2 hours straight without a single guide exposure timeout.

Hi Jasem,

I let it run for a bit longer now and I get a lot of exposure time outs. I add the kstars log but to me there's not much more information in it. The odd thing is that when i only connect the guide camera and a telescope simulator and ccd simulator, there is no problem and everything is rock solid. But as soon as i connect my mount, a Celestron Evolution, with a serial connection through the hand controller I get the exposure time outs. It also happens when Ekos tries to download an exposure from my Canon DSLR. When I use the guide camera with Windows and ASCOM it is rock solid all the time. I really hope you can resolve this because I love using Ekos/kstars on Stellarmate a lot. I find it the most user friendly imaging acquisition suite out there but for now it's not a reliable solution for me. If there is anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to reach out. Thanks again for all your hard work for the community. 

Some additional information. I see the same behaviour in PHD2. When I connect my guide camera to PHD2 and the INDI Telescope Simulator, the guide camera keeps on taking exposure. When I change the mount to the INDI Celestron GPS driver, I get exposure time outs in PHD2. Exactly the same as with the internal guider of Ekos. So it seems to me there is some interference with the serial connection to the mount and the USB connection to the Touptek camera's. I had a discussion about this with a member of my astronomy club who has the exact same issue with his Omegon camera and his iOptron mount. I'm not sure of this is of any help but I hope it narrows it down a little

So I ran this thus far for 20 minutes without a single time out. Altair for primary camera and Toupcam for guide camera.

Hi Jasem,

Please see my previous message. When I use Toupcam Guide Camera via the Telescope Simulator I also have no exposure time outs. But as soon as I use real mount with a usb to serial connection through the Celestron hand controller I get the time outs. Same behaviour in PHD2 on Stellarmate

Well, I can't replicate exactly that but I have serial devices connected to StellarMate and still no issues. Try to swap ports, or check power supply. (now running 35 mins with 5 devices connected to StellarMate and still no timeouts)

I tried all of that over the course of a couple of months. Different USB-cables, different powered hubs, non-powered hubs, exactly the same behaviour running kstars natively on my macbook pro and on Linux Ubuntu virtual machine on my HP-laptop. But everytime I get the same results. So I'm pretty out of options by now. The only thing left to do I if there's no solution for this is to get a new guide camera maybe. Any suggestions on what is a good reliable option?

Reading that, I would bet that something is going on with the mount or the mount driver.

Something odd, but my troubleshooting steps would be :

1. Run PHD2 and connect only the cam, not the mount. Do you still have time outs?

2. I would create a fresh SD card with Astroberry or with AstroPi3 script, and run try again with the mount connected. Do you still have time outs?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I've had a very similar issue recently. I was able to debug it and prepare a fix. It has been merged to master today. Can you confirm that it fixes things for you, too?

It's been a long while since I used my Stellarmate but I will defenitely give it a go once the new INDI-lib version comes out and I'll let you know how it went.

May I ask a question related to this problem?

I'm using a veTEC533c with Astroberry & Stellarmate via RPi4 USB3 port.
Additionally I'm using a ZWO ASI120MC-S connected via USB-3 cable to the veTEC USB-2.0 HUB.
The veTEC is powered by external 12V.

This works great and as expected using the internal Guider, not PHD2.
Now I want to exchange the ASI120MC-S by a veTEC GUIDE 2000M (has an USB2.0 Port).

Could the above stated problem also occure if using the "Internal Guider" or is is only related to the usage of PHD2?

Cheers
Hardy