Bidirectional movement of the FW - Forums

I am facing a small problem with my Touptek AFW. A couple of days ago I imaged NGC1333. After integration of more than 6h LRGB I wondered how colorless my RGB image was (more or less black and white). First I thought: you need more captures, the object is only 17 mag… Unfortunately the problem was my FW. In the NINA FW preferences I checked the option for bidirectional movement, but somehow this caused problems. The FW didn't move to the next position with the result that I now have 6h of NGC1333 luminance captures.
When I came to examine the behaviour closer it was clear that when the bidirectional option is checked the FW starts to move but then abruptly stops the movement. NINA doesn't seem to notice that, for NINA the system has moved to the next filter and imaging can go on.
I unchecked the option in the preferences and see there, now it works as it should (you can even hear that it now really moves to the next position).
Does anyone out there faces similar problems with the Touptek AFW?

CS,
Xeno

Hi,

this might not help you, but I had a similar problem with a ZWO filter wheel once. With every software it only worked while turning only in one direction. Later on I switched to NINA and it worked really well with the bidirectional setting. I never found out why…

However, I am not sure if this is related to NINA itself. It may be a problem with the filter wheels firmware and/or the driver. There is some kind of mechanism in the FW that recognizes the currently selected filter position. (At least the ZWOs have one and I assume the others have as well. I would design it this way as well…) If it reaches the desired position, the FW might give a signal to the driver to signalize a successfully executed move. If this is the case, NINA can't recognize any errors (which seems to be the case).

There is still the possibility that it is NINAs fault, though. But maybe there is a driver or firmware update available. At least this is worth a try.

There is one more possibility, though. Now I remember. I occasionally had issues with one filter wheel. It did not change filters anymore after some imaging time. It was connected to the USB hub of my ZWO camera. Today, I think, the problem occured because of a poor power supply. A while ago, I redesigned my observatory electronics and since then, I use a much more powerful power supply. I never had any issues since then. This is true for some other issues I had as well. So maybe you should check this with your setup, too. You might not believe, how many little and random problems I solved with a bigger power supply.

I don't know if this has any value for you, but at least it's some kind of brainstorming…

Hope you solve your problem soon.

CS
Christian