Hi Quality camera board sometimes hangs

[Short-bus]

Have seen rare occasions where the camera board hangs during a raspistill call. The photograph capture begins, but never ends. The software detects this and raises an error message, but so far no way to resolve the issue within the software. Solution at the moment is to power cycle the whole raspberry pi to clear the problem. Online search suggests this may sometimes occur if there is a power issue to the board.

[Short-bus]

Don't confuse this with a similar symptom when the software is simulating the camera. When simulating complex images the software may take a lot longer than a real exposure would take, the software may consider this a failed exposure too. But it is NOT the cause of the camera board itself hanging. Recently no camera board hangs have occurred, so not able to test further.

[Short-bus]

Witnessed the camera apparently hanging, this is the first time in months that it has happened. Left the program to time out, it fails to shut down completely because the camerathread is still waiting for raspistill to return. Instead of using ctrl-c to get the thread to terminate, I left it to run and see what happens. After about 17 minutes the camera thread finally terminated by itself. It appears that raspistill did eventually return control to the camerathread, but no idea why it took so long to capture the image. The log file shows this 1049 second image capture, then the routine continues and terminates normally. Actual exposure time requested was 10 seconds.

2024-02-05 18:48:45.643657+00:00    115.117265  astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Capture complete. ( 1046.07428 s).
2024-02-05 18:48:45.647283+00:00    0.000308    astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Load image from /media/pi/USBMEMORY/campaign_uranus_e10.0s/session_20240205181818/light/light_20240205183119_00.jpg
2024-02-05 18:48:45.650956+00:00    0.000068    pilomarimage camera .LoadFile( /media/pi/USBMEMORY/campaign_uranus_e10.0s/session_20240205181818/light/light_20240205183119_00.jpg )
2024-02-05 18:48:46.218098+00:00    0.563278    astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Image loaded.
2024-02-05 18:48:46.222966+00:00    0.000052    astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Converting to RAW (.DNG) file...
2024-02-05 18:48:47.740181+00:00    1.513554    astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Converted to RAW (.DNG) file.
2024-02-05 18:48:47.745066+00:00    0.000065    pilomarimage camera .SaveFile( /media/pi/USBMEMORY/campaign_uranus_e10.0s/session_20240205181818/light/light_20240205183119_00.jpg )
2024-02-05 18:48:48.323474+00:00    0.574238    astrocamera.CaptureSetFull(): Completed
2024-02-05 18:48:48.327252+00:00    0.000098    astrocamera.TakePhoto: Complete
2024-02-05 18:48:48.331752+00:00    0.000093    CameraHandler: End image capture
2024-02-05 18:48:48.335935+00:00    0.000103    CameraHandler: Total capture time 1048813.797ms. (mult= 104.8813797 )
2024-02-05 18:48:48.341235+00:00    0.000759    Folder for image details: /media/pi/USBMEMORY/campaign_uranus_e10.0s/session_20240205181818/
2024-02-05 18:48:48.374669+00:00    0.029583    pilomarimage camera .LineDetection()
2024-02-05 18:48:49.112723+00:00    0.733557    CameraHandler: Loop completed image in 1049.6 seconds
2024-02-05 18:48:49.117159+00:00    0.000118    CameraHandler: Completed loop 1345
2024-02-05 18:48:49.122025+00:00    0.000088    CameraHandler: TimeAllocation: image 1614.2388300000002 seconds ( 88 %)
2024-02-05 18:48:49.127320+00:00    0.000053    CameraHandler: TimeAllocation: pause 86.35953700000002 seconds ( 4 %)
2024-02-05 18:48:49.132888+00:00    0.000049    CameraHandler: TimeAllocation: preview 31.153741999999998 seconds ( 1 %)
2024-02-05 18:48:49.136913+00:00    0.000059    CameraHandler: TimeAllocation: tracking 90.38564799999999 seconds ( 4 %)
2024-02-05 18:48:49.142995+00:00    0.000080    CameraHandler: Parent thread is nolonger alive. Terminating
2024-02-05 18:48:54.154757+00:00    5.006073    CameraHandler: Finished.