Restarting NIRC

The times are long gone since NIRC crashed regularly several times a night. Still, especially during speckle nights, we do have the sporadic crash. This is sometimes referred to as a "hanging dot" crash, because the dots printed every second (roughly) by the image commands while an exposure is in progress keep going and going.

First, check to see whether the log file indicates whether there are still speckle frames being read. There's a chance that you accidentally left coadds set to a large value, and are taking a speckle cube that will take much longer to complete than anticipated. Check the coadds in the NIRC Status Window, as well as your integration time. In principle a countdown timer should pop up for exposures longer than 60 seconds, and if this has long since expired you probably have a crash.

Recovery should be easy: simply select "Reset NIRC Software" under the "NIRC Tools" on your desktop menu.

Occasionally other problems occur, such as dropouts in communication between the instrument computer (maili) and the crate (rabbit) or the electronics. Try "ping rabbit". If you get no response rabbit may be hung or communications may be down. You can try rebooting rabbit by typing "~#" in the rabbit tip window, but if this does not work you may have to recycle power out on the instrument itself.

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