Stop NINA File Camera watching subfolders for new files?

[John Parker]

NINA 1.10 Nightly #45

I thought I had worked out how to use NINA File Camera but the other night I kept on getting an error “Unable to find the specified file" I tired all manner of things stopping and restarting the NINA File Camera and including the reboot of my laptop but the fault persisted.

I am sure I now know why.

I have an issue #425 that requires me to take jpegs as well as RAW files (Olympus camera) and save to a folder. This means my jpegs gets processed by NINA to a fits file.

When using NINA File Camera with my Olympus DSLR camera it saves files to a folder which I create such as

C:\Users\User\Pictures\OLYMPUS Capture\2020_01_06

This works ok when there are no sub folders under it.

I thought I would be neat and told NINA under Options Imaging to save the fits files under the same folder as my DSLR images

Image File Path C:\Users\User\Pictures\OLYMPUS Capture\2020_01_06

This creates a sub folder \LIGHT and saves the fits files to this folder.

My Olympus camera exposures are 60 secs with noise reduction turned on. I set the NINA sequence to a time of 70 secs. Because I dither when the Olympus camera goes into dark frame mode NINA does its dithering in the dark frame period so that I do not lose imaging time though dithering.

When running the sequence in NINA it reads my jpeg image and reports stars and HFR it then goes through another 70 secs followed by the dither settling time and then faults with the message “Unable to find the specified file" .

It seems that the simulated camera in NINA is also watching subfolders. Because the subfolder \LIGHT contains a new *.fits file it thinks it has a new file in the watching folder. When it goes to look it up in the watching folder it does not find it so up comes the error.

Now the way round it is to ensure that you do not save fits files under a sub folder of the main watching folder.

I have seen somewhere on a forum someone else having unable to find file problems with NINA File Camera. I do not know if this is the expected behaviour if so a note warning on the NINA File Camera should avoid others having the same issue.

The neatest solution would be to stop NINA watching subfolders and only watch the specified folder.

[Stefan B]

https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina/pull-requests/416

with this PR is merged, it is possible to restrict the file watcher to watch only for a specific file extension.

[John Parker]

Not sure I have understood what you have done. If I make the selection just to watch for ORF files but because this is a DSLR RAW file a RAW file is created with the extension .ORF in the subfolder LIGHT and the error “Unable to find the specified file" stops the sequence. Under Options Imaging I have Save as FITS. But note says For DSLRs the image format is ignored. RAW format will be saved instead! I am not sure why when using DSLR RAW which is already saved to a folder you would want to save another RAW file to another folder? I could see it may be useful if the raw file was save as a FITS to included RA / DEC coordinates.

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[Stefan B]

Hi,

the file camera has some limitations right now.
Basically you want to have one temporary folder where your camera moves the raw files into and the save folder is something else.
It’s true that the process is redundant to have the raw file inside this temp folder and saving into another folder again this raw data, but that’s a limitation of the camera right now.
What you should not have is having the save folder and the folder the file camera is watching to be the same. this might cause trouble.

[John Parker]

Thanks for explanation Stefan its not a problem now I know not to selection the same folder to save the ORF’s in.