Application hangs on "Camera Busy"

[eebclee]

BackyardEOS 3.2.2, Canon 80D.  I generally have the camera set up with mirror lockup, long exposure noise correction (in camera dark subtraction), ISO 200, 15 second exposures, 5 sec mirror delay.  That or a series of short exposures with varying exposure times that don't use LENC, particularly if I'm trying a series of exposures on the moon for instance.  BackyardEOS randomly hangs up when it gets to "BUSY" while the camera is taking a dark or saving the image to the card -- it's waiting on the camera forever.  I have to quit the application and start over.  I've never successfully completed a series of varying exposures because of this.  Last night I set up a series of 80 x 15 sec exposures and in three tries never got all 80, 38 total so on average it was hanging after ~12 or fewer frames.  If I do series of short exposures it doesn't get more than 2-6 frames in before hanging up.  If I set up a single exposure and set it to loop though, it usually works fine, I can let it run for hours.

I had been connecting to the camera wirelessly, and thought that might be the problem, so I'm not connected via USB cable.  Unfortunately that hasn't changed anything.  I also tried a second cable.

Suggestions?  Is there some timeout I can adjust?  Any idea why it would behave differently in loop vs. a set number of exposures?

Thanks.

[admin]

Do you have an SD card in the camera?

If yes remove it and set the camera to allow taking pictures without a card.  

If it works, this could be indicative that your sd card is stating to fail.

It's odd that loop is working.... this said, try a normal play (no loop) but add a 2 to 3 second pause between exposures.

Keep us posted.

[astroman133]

Try simplifying your capture plan. Remove LENR, remove Mirror Lockup and save only to the PC. Does that configuration work with capture plans that were not completing? If so, add LENR back and try it again. If that works, try saving to the card instead of to the PC. If that works try enabling LENR.

I would consider not using LENR. Your exposures are not that long, AND you can take darks if you even need them.

I would also only use Mirror Lockup if you can actually see that not using it is affecting your raw images. It is not needed in most cases.

[eebclee]

I didn't suspect the card -- I recently started using a new fast 128GB card.  I just swapped in an older slower 64GB card and it got through a full ~1hr set of 80 exposures with no problem.  I'll swap back to the 128BG card and see what happens, but right now the card is looking suspicious.

astroman133 -- I've already seen that mirror lockup makes a difference.  As for darks, the temperature here has been changing a lot in the evenings.  I wish Canon exposed shutter control to developers so that I could program a dark every 5 exposures or so.  (I work on scientific cameras myself and can't imagine not having shutter control in the API!)  Short of that, collecting darks isn't automatable on my current setup.  Darks collected at the start of the night would be at a higher temperature and likely over subtract.
 

[eebclee]

Well, both cards worked fine this time.  I'll see what happens tonight when I'm trying to take actual images.

[astroman133]

I totally understand about the effects of temperature change during an imaging session. Where I live, the temperature often changes by 40 degrees or more throughout the course of a session. I have to use a cooled camera, where I have a consistent temperature throughout a session and for sessions where I want to combine images over a period of days or weeks.

[eebclee]

Unable to reproduce last night either.  If it comes back I'll go through these steps to try and isolate the problem.

[astroman133]

Inconsistent symptoms does not seem to be a software issue. I would look at cabling and connections.

Let us know how it goes.