Sunday, September 11, 2016

interconnected 4 and 6

Another test. Pins 4 and 6 on the serial DB9 port were interconnected. I had overlooked this from Beskeen's diagram... I noticed this after the afternoon test.

12:12 AM. At first, I was hopeful. Standby yellow LED was burning immediately. I didn't think I had seen that before. But after the initial delay, I did not hear the mirror go up. And then the shutter didn't open.

Happily, I was able to issue an Abort command in Backyard and it responded at normal speeds. I was able to saving the image profile.

12:16. Rebooted everything. Cold iron.

12:24. Remembered the note in the user manual about the Virtual Mirror setting. Turned it on.

No joy. It's actually worse. The camera is not operating at all. Aborted again.

12:28. Popped into Frame & Focus. All's well. Turned off the mirror option in the imaging run and tried. Camera worked fine. That suggests the USB is OK and BYE is OK. I noticed the red LED extinguished and the yellow turned on. Huh.

12:31. Reseated the N3 cable at the camera body and reseated the submini plug. Holy moley. Started working again. Gah.

But. At the end of the run, the red LED is burning. So that's the serial port holding the shutter button...

Tried to program a single shot. No luck. In fact, some BYE error.

Disconnected and reconnected. More error messages and an empty dialog.

Quit the app and the yellow LED came back.

12:40. Did another test. Looks like the mirror up time gets included in the exposure time. Regardless, disconnected at the end of the run and the port reset. Back to yellow LED. So, I have a workaround.

12:49. Turned on the virtual mirror option. Set the exposure time to 13 seconds. Set the mirror up time to 3 seconds. Counted steamboats. This time I got 10 second shots. Software virtual setting appeared to have no effect. A full quit reset the serial port.

1:07. I started to wonder if there might be an old DOS MODE command I could issue. Did a quick test. I think the COM port is locked while BYE is running.

Or perhaps there is a setting I can configure in advance, like DSR handshaking, or XON/XOFF. Ugh. Lots of permutations.

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