BYEOS ver 3.13 crashes occasionally with my Canon 450D ?

[joelschmid]

I am having an occasional issue where BYEOS ver 3.13 will lockup in the middle of an imaging run while downloading the raw image from the camera.

I had a great session going last night on NGC7814 and 4 exposures in BYEOS locked up while transferring the raw file.

I had already gone to bed after starting the run trusting BYEOS would handle things for me while I slept.

Alas, this was not to be.

Is there any debug data I can capture to help trouble shoot this issue ?

I estimate this problem occurs roughly 1 in 24 image transfers while transferring the raw images from camera to BYEOS.

If I upgrade to 3.1.5 will performance improve ?

 

Joel Schmid (AKA scully1234 on CN)

 

[astroman133]

Joel,

 

Updating to BYE 3.1.5 will not hurt, but it is not likely to help either.  Nobody else has reported your issue, so it is likely to be some other problem with your setup.

 

Typical issues are with flaky USB cables or overloaded USB hubs (either an external hub or a hub that is internal to your PC). You could try a shorter USB cable between your camera and the PC.  Try it without any other USB devices (guide camera, for example).  Is it better behaved?  You can also try to re-create your issue using the Canon EOS Utility.  With the EOS Utility you may have to trigger your exposures one at a time, but if you only have to take a couple dozen exposures it should show itself pretty quickly.  Making those changes, one at a time or in combination, should point at what is causing your problem.

 

Guylain will probably want you to zip up your BYE log files and send them to him.  The log files are in the Logs subfolder of wherever you have pointed the BackyardTEMP folder.  I would let him ask for them so that he knows that they are coming.

[admin]

Usually lockups are cause by USB overload as Rick said.

 

Send me the log files and I'll take a look at them.

 

Regards,

[joelschmid]

OK

I will try a shorter USB cable run.

Right now I have a long USB cable, a powered extender, and plugging into a powered hub to reach from the camera mounted on scope over to my work table in the observatory.

Total length is about 20 feet.

It is a good quality powered extender running off a powered hub.

Trying a shorter cable will mean having wires hanging in the air across the room in my observatory.

I would like to avoid that if possible.

When it hangs again I will save the log files and send them to Guy.

 

I did upgrade to 3.1.5 last night and did another 32 exposure session.

I had no lockups.

 

Thanks !

[astroman133]

Joel,

 

I have a similar setup with about a 6 ft cable running from the camera to the hub and then a 15 ft active extension cable running from the hub into the PC in the warm room.  In addition to the imaging camera the hub has mount, focuser, guide camera, and TEMPerHum connected to it.

 

You don't have to test the camera on the telescope or at night.  Daytime testing right next to the computer will work just as well.