Troubleshooting

For all of your troubleshooting needs. Here we detail some of the common problems encountered and the solutions for these problems.

Automatic Mode Stop Button Not Working

If the Stop button in the automatic mode GUI is not working and fails to stop the loop as designed, then this is likely because of an oversight when the code was changed. The loop will run forever until stopped as per the design of the automatic mode.

You can force the loop to stop gracefully by creating a file named opihiexarata.stop in the same data directory that the automatic loop is fetching the most recent images from. The loop checks for the existence of this file and it will stop in a similar way to if the stop button was pressed. The loop will be considered Halted as it stopped via a method other than the Stop button.

If this fails, then the suggested remedy is to ungracefully stop or crash the process that OpihiExarata is running in.

In either case, this is an error with the code of OpihiExarata and the maintainers of the software should be contacted.

OSError Too Many Open Files

Sometimes there is an issue where there are too many open files. This happens due to Astropy using memory mapping for reading FITS files. The references are not actually terminated and because of this it reaches the Linux file limit. See the Astropy FAQ.

OpihiExarata should already have a memory mapping disabled and some mitigation to avoid this issue. However, the effectiveness and pitfalls of the mitigation is not fully understood. Hence this troubleshooting entry.

A temporary fix if this issue ever occurs is to close the OpihiExarata window and optionally restart the terminal session/window it is in.

PySide GUI Does Not Match Documentation or UI Files

This problem can be caused by one of two things.

If the documentation and the GUI differs, then the documentation may be out of date. Otherwise, the Python GUI files built by PySide6 are out of date and need to be built again.

If the documentation is out of date, see Optional: Documentation for rebuilding up to date documentation. If information is missing, please contact the maintainers to update the documentation.

If the GUI differs from the Qt Designer UI files, then the Python UI needs to be built from these files. See Building UI Files for more information.