ASA DDM85 - no connection after restart Autoslew

[astrobry]

Hello all,

I have been using my ASA DDM85 for about 10 years now and suddenly I have a strange phenomenon. 
I use my mount all evening with The sky 6, CCD commander and MaximDL. After observing I close all programs and leave my PC on. The power supply of the mount and all peripherals is switched off. I have been working like this for years without any problems.
When I switch everything back on the next day and start autoslew, I get an error message from autoslew since a few days: "axis 1 not responding.... please check power and USB connection....".  After some trying, the only possibility is to shut down and restart the PC and then the mount does work.  The PC is still running on Windows 7, and Autoslew version is 5.2.4.0.
Someone has an idea what is causing this, I can of course solve it by the work-around: reboot PC.

thanking in advance,

Erik.

[Waldemar]

Hi Wojtek,

I am sorry, but very few people outside Poland speak Polish... would you mind translating into English please?

😉 Waldemar

[Wojtek Gdańsk]

Hello and sorry that I posted the answer in Polish, I must have been tired😉.
  I have DDM 60 and I had the same problem more than once.
I had to disconnect the power from the DDM and also disconnect the USB port on the DDM.
This action helped.
greetings
Wojtek.

Edited June 20, 2021 by Wojtek Gdańsk

[Waldemar]

Hi Erik, Does this have anything to do with the new USB hub you think?

[MarkS]

This may or may not be much help, but I have been using a DDM60 in mobile systems for some years, and I evolved by trial and error a start up procedure which guarantees a clean start up. I transferred the procedure to my DDM85A rollabout system and it also works every time.

An important feature is that once everything is connected together, the mount power is turned on BEFORE the computer power is turned on. This always seemed to guarantee clean a start up, whereas failure to do this could cause problems....... I never found out why, and I just did what worked.

Mark

[astrobry]

On 6/21/2021 at 1:02 AM, MarkS said:

An important feature is that once everything is connected together, the mount power is turned on BEFORE the computer power is turned on. This always seemed to guarantee clean a start up, whereas failure to do this could cause problems....... I never found out why, and I just did what worked.

Hi Mark,

That is the solution I am using now. The PC is always on because of all the equipment that stays in service for weather, SQM, allsky and other data collection that is needed.  Now I take the mount in service (power on) and reboot the PC.This is how it works now.  How this now suddenly appears I do not know.