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panoptes / POCS

An Observatory Control System for the PANOPTES citizen-science project designed to help find transiting exoplanets! :telescope: :stars:
https://pocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
MIT License
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SBIG Camera support does not work with STX series cameras #774

Open AnthonyHorton opened 5 years ago

AnthonyHorton commented 5 years ago

In theory the support for Diffraction Limited (SBIG) cameras in pocs.cameras.sbig should work with any model of SBIG camera, however when I tried to use it with an STX-16803 camera the camera initialisation failed. The problem was that the pocs.camera.sbigudrv.SBIGDriver.query_temp_status() method (which sends the CC_QUERY_TEMPERATURE_STATUS command to the camera) resulted in a CE_MEMORY_ERROR error.

The driver documentation discusses changes to the CC_QUERY_TEMPERATURE_STATUS command that need to be taken into account in order to support STX cameras, however the POCS code is already using the newer interface so ought to be working.

It's possible that this was in fact a problem with the driver itself. I was using the Linux version, the latest release of which dates from October 2013, whereas the most recent Windows driver is from May 2017.

AnthonyHorton commented 5 years ago

Diffraction Limited have investigated the issue and confirmed that it is in fact a bug in the current release version of the Linux driver, specifically an x64 compatibility issue.

We have received a patched version of the Linux driver from Diffraction Limited that apparently fixes the bug, however this has not yet been tested with POCS