Problems of 9/25/2011

Got a lot accomplished since last list but as usual more problems creep up over time.

Software

• Focus driver - implementing in RTS2 - DONE
  
• AstroHaven dome driver needs update to stop spamming error messages and to add feedback from new dome control hardware
• TBan driver needs code to handle when device is not there rather than spam messages - DONE
  
• Add user friendly GUI to control primitive features of the system
  
• Possibly add Android app interface/add
  

Hardware

• Ordered another Webswitch, they are so cool - DONE
  
• Mount Telescope and pier - DONE
  
• Buy cabling management for inside of dome
  
• Repair crack in AstroHaven Dome
  
• Still need to spec out computer capable of extreme temperatures. Computer still needs to have PCI slots and serial ports. Don't want to use USB<->Serial
• Draw a plan for UPS during extreme temps - put off
  
• Add lens heater on LX200GPS to reduce night dew.
• Corrosion on BigNG board - ordered new one - DONE
  

Binning and RTS2

Recently we've been having some troubles getting binning to work under RTS2 with our Alta CCD. Binning is a technique that can be used to speed up the dead time spent reading an image from the CCD - something that is very useful for the kind of high frame rate we wish to achieve with our system.

During testing a month or two ago we found that our Alta U47 would become unresponsive after setting the binning to 2x2 in the RTS2 monitor. The camera essentially stops responding to commands and needs to be power cycled to come back to life. I've been debugging the Apogee drivers forked in the RTS2 codebase for a while until I stumbled onto a quick fix: simply set the binning in the CCD script instead of directly in the monitor! I'm not sure why I didn't try this earlier. Here's an example:

rts2-scriptexec -d C0 -s 'binning=1 E 2 E 2'

This script sets the binning and then exposes twice for 2 seconds each. The readout time is about 0.5-0.8 seconds for each frame. Note that 1x1 binning is actually selected as "binning=0" and 2x2 is "binning=1" in the script.