Guider attatchment to profiles does not stay put

[Jerry Macon]

If you have two profiles because you are running two scope/camera setups, one of them will have a guider and the other will not, since only one scope can be guiding. The attachment of a guider flops back and forth as you open and close the two copies of NINA. I will call one profile GUIDER, the other NOTGUIDER. GUIDER should always have a guider connected. NOTGUIDER should never have a guider connected. This status flops back and forth depending on the order you open and close the two versions. The one than first comes up I think is the last one that got closed. If that is not the one I want, I load the other profile. It may or may not have the correct guider attachment status. Depends on order. In other words what is happening is the guider attachment status in one profile gets transferred to the other profile.

[Stanley Dimant]

aside from this error, why are you not using the synchronized phd2 guider for both instances

[Jerry Macon]

Why would I want 2 different programs trying to guide a single mount?

[Stanley Dimant]

Synchronized phd2 is what it says, synchronized phd2. It will sync across multiple instances and also only dither when neither camera is exposing.

[Stanley Dimant]

Synchronized phd2 is to synchronize phd2 across multiple Nina instances and multiple cameras taking exposures at once.

[Jerry Macon]

I don’t dither, even when just running one scope/camera, which is more often than not. I have not found dithering to be worth the wasted time. Cosmetic correction in PI handles hot/cold pixels perfectly. So I have no need for a second guider.

[Jerry Macon]

I also don’t see how it makes any sense to have more than one program sending guide commands to the mount. They could easily fight with each other, and there is no use for having two. One is adequate and sufficient. Coordinated dithering it seems to me should be handled by NINA and not PHD2.

[Dale Ghent]

I think you misunderstand the thing still. There is no “second guider” - Synchronized PHD2 makes one running copy of NINA a server which also is the only copy that talks to PHD2, and the other(s) a client to it. The two communicate so that that a dither operation is done when at the first available interval between exposures across all running copies of NINA. This avoids the issue of multi-scoped mounts being dithered by one application without regard to other copies of the app and whether those are in the middle of an active exposure. Furthermore, dithering happens asynchronously during frame download, and on most mounts is a few 10s of seconds at most.

At any rate, you ought to have separate profiles for each instance of NINA. They might be 99% similar in all respects except for which one has PHD2 set as the guider and which one has No Guider set. You are not running into a bug.

[Stanley Dimant]

I think he does have two profiles so it might still be a bug but I’d need to reproduce it on my side which i haven't had time for yet.

[Stefan B]

Fix Issue #571 - Guider attatchment to profiles does not stay put

→ <<cset 27d2a528a290>>

[Stefan B]

Will be fixed with RC4

[Jerry Macon]

Yes, I definitely have two profiles. Not only do they differ by GUIDER having a guider attached, and NOTGUIDER having no guider attached. Also they differ completely in color scheme. Makes it very easy to keep track of which one I am monitoring at the moment. So half or more of the nights when I start up NINA with GUIDER, there is no guider attached, so I have to reattach it. Easy to do, just a nuisance. And just as likely, when I bring up NOTGUIDER, it may have PHD2 attached. Definitely a cross pollination between the two profiles going on. I see your design for the synchronized dithering. Looks very clever and effective. But as I said, I have no use for dithering even on a single scope. That has made it easy for me to run two scopes with SGP for years. But NINA is now far superior. You have a convert.

[Jerry Macon]

That fix was fast. Great going guys!