Selected Imaging and Guiding camera identifiers are preserved
among sessions
When SIMS was launched, it went through all available
(connected) cameras, for which a driver was installed, and chose
the first one as default imager. This behavior was OK if only one
camera was connected at startup, but if both imaging and guiding
cameras were connected, it was only a matter of chance if SIMS
chooses e.g. guiding camera as imager. Then the user has to open
CCD Camera tool and choose proper imager and guider
cameras.
New version 1.1.7 of SIMS software stores identifiers of
previously selected imaging and guiding cameras and tries to find
them among all connected cameras. If it is able to find cameras
with proper identifier, if selects them for the role they were
used during previous sessions. It is of course possible to select
different cameras anytime later.
Camera cooling and heating slopes
SIMS version 1.1.7 also eliminates irregular cooling/heating
slopes. It is always better to cool down or heat up the camera
only at certain speed (expressed in degrees Celsius per minute).
Rapid cooling causes thermal shocks to CCD detector and can also
lead to increased number of hot pixels or can even damage the CCD
chip package itself. This is why SIMS offers the user to define
the cooling/heating speed in the Cooling tab of the
CCD Camera control tool. However, previous versions of
SIMS could not follow the desired slope properly, the temperature
changes was usually slower then required and often irregular. New
release fixes the problem and follows the desired CCD temperature
accurately.
Irregular cooling slope (left) and fixed one
(right)
Another fixes, enhancements and function changes
The following functions were added or
updated:
GPS and telescope drivers communicating over serial line
(COM port) do not try to open a line upon driver initialization.
If multiple drivers, stated in the sims.ini file, tried to open
one serial line, the second (and all subsequent) driver
naturally failed to open the same serial line, already occupied
by the first driver. New behavior is the driver opens the line
only when the user selects it in the GPS or telescope control
tool. Other driver stay passive and do not try to open the line,
check the presence of the hardware etc.
Changes of the automatic stretching of newly
captured/opened images, introduced in SIMS version 1.1.6, could
cause improper rendering of images during focusing (displayed in
the Focus tab of the CCD Camera tool window).
New version fixes this problem and renders focusing images
according to preferred automatic stretching options.
Fixed problem in Garmin GPS USB driver, which occurred
when the driver was selected, but no GPS device was connected to
USB port.
Although Gx camera driver (g3ccd.dll) needs a proper .ini
file (g3ccd.ini) to enumerate filters installed in the
particular camera, the number of installed filters reported to
SIMS no longer depends on parsing of the .ini file, but it is
read directly from the camera, so it represents real number of
filters.
Median combine tool could caused overflow of bright
pixels (bright portions of images appeared dark) when a
Level image means option was selected.
The last problem was not in SIMS software itself, but it
was caused by Gx CCD camera system drivers. Still we notify it
here to let users know the problem is already fixed. The
communication with Gx CCD cameras could hang-up when a small
sub-frame of certain sizes was captured and read from the
camera. Unfortunately the Focus sized sub-frame (192 x 192 pixels)
also could cause hangup when read as normal exposure. The
problem was fixed in the G2 Rev.3+/G3/G4 driver g3ccd.sys
version 1.4 and higher and in the G2 Rev.1 and 2 driver
g2ccd2.sys version 2.7 and higher. We recommend to download
latest system driver package from this web site and to update
system drivers to the latest version.
SIMS v1.1.7 can be freely downloaded from the download section of this WWW server.
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