Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Pearson, Matthew R." <[email protected]> · Fri, 23 Sep 2016 12:54:05 +0000

Hi,

We have an Andor sCMOS Zyla camera and we use the Andor3 support in areaDetector. This uses the Andor SDK3 API to control the camera and read out data. Sometimes we see the Andor3 driver get into a state because the:

status = AT_WaitBuffer(handle_, &image, &size, AT_INFINITE);

function always immediately returns with error code 11 (which means AT_ERR_NODATA). The Andor3 driver ends up then calling AT_WaitBuffer repeatedly in a tight loop, causing giant log files, until we exit the IOC.

The function should block until there is a data frame to read from the SDK, but it doesn’t, which is a problem. I’ve contacted Andor about this (and they asked me to update my SDK version from 3.9 to the latest version).

Has anyone else also seen this problem?

When I get chance I’ll try to reproduce it, and also update the SDK. I’m not sure if we can easily recover from this state, without restarting the IOC, but perhaps the Andor3 driver could detect this problem and set the ADStatus error flag. I’ll experiment with that if I can reproduce the problem. 

A bit suspiciously we also see an uncaught exception when we exit the IOC:

2016/09/22 19:46:04.402 andor3:imageTask: AT_WaitBuffer, error=11
2016/09/22 19:46:04.402 andor3:imageTask: AT_WaitBuffer, error=11
2016[Thu Sep 22 19:46:07 2016] /09/22 19:46:04.402 andor3:imageTask: AT_WaitBuffer, error=11
terminate called after throwing an instance of '[Thu Sep 22 19:46:07 2016] TSDK3Exception'
[Thu Sep 22 19:46:07 2016]   what():  TDualCLLogicalControl: Error - Sensor halves are not running in unison

Cheers,
Matt

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System