Switch Camera Fan off/on

[StefanBaar]

Is it possible to manually switch the ccd Fan ON or OFF? So far the fan turns on with sbig-cooler on. But sbig-cooler off does not stop the fan. (In my case, I am using SBIG STL-1001 3 CCD Camera)

Thank you very much for writing sbig-util and making it available publicly.

[garlick]

Thanks for the report. According to SBIGUdrv manual, it looks like the fan can be enabled/disabled (and on some models like STX/STT the the fan speed can be set) with

MiscellaneousControlParams.fanEnable in the SBIGUdrv API (sec 3.5.5).

I'll add a way to set that with the sbig ctl utility I'm working on (hopefully will wrap that up soon - I got a bit distracted lately).

I don't think we currently do anything to alter the default fan behavior, so presumably that's what your camera is doing now (maybe it will turn off after TE is disabled for a while and it has a chance to exhaust heat?)

[garlick]

I implemented what I thought would work here over in PR #39:

sbig-ctl  cooling.fan.enabled[=0]

(0=off, 1=on)

but actually, on a STF-8300C, this seems to have no effect, and on a ST-7E, the fan can be turned off but not on.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but I'll keep at it. @shissler1987, if you have time to check out that branch and try it with your camera, that would be a useful datapoint.

[StefanBaar]

@garlick, Thank you for the quick response. Sorry, it took me a while to reply.

On the ST1001, running: sbig ctl cooling.fan.enabled=0 turns the fan off

However: sbig ctl cooling.fan.enabled=1 does not turn the fan back on.

Usually, when I plug in the camera power, the fan does not start spinning right away. It starts spinning after using the sbig cooler on command.

However, once the fan is turned off using the ctl command, the "sbig cooler on -5" does not turn the fan back on anymore.

Thank you for all the effort, that you put in this project. This is really helpfull.

[garlick]

It sounds like INDI people had a similar problem with the sbig fan control. Still digging to see how they solved it.

http://indilib.org/forum/ccds-dslrs/874-sbig-fan.html

https://sourceforge.net/p/indi/bugs/74/

[garlick]

As an experiment I tried with libsbigudrv.so (64 bit Intel) from

ftp://ftp.diffractionlimited.com/pub/devsw/LinuxDevKit.tar.gz

by running

sbig -S libsbigudrv.so ctl cooling.fan.enabled=0
sbig -S libsbigudrv.so ctl cooling.fan.enabled=1

On the ST-7E, the fan turned both off and on (an improvement!) On the STF-8300C, no effect (as before)

Prior to this, I had been using the libsbigudrv2 package from INDI:

dpkg -l libsbigudrv2
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii  libsbigudrv2   2.1.1+r3681~ amd64        Santa Barbra Instrument Group (SB

so as discussed in the above indi forms, the fan control seems iffy in some versions of the udrv. Probably the best recourse is to bring this up on one of the DL forums which I'll try.

[garlick]

I posted a question here:

http://www.diffractionlimited.com/forum/threads/question-on-fan-control-in-sbigudrv-for-linux.4253/