[gregbradley]

I have found an approach that I find very helpful. Sometimes if I am debugging an aspect of my gear that I am finding to be frustrating and I am not winning and progessing and other things are starting to go wrong. I find it better to withdraw from it and have a cup of tea or leave it until the next day.

Usually I have bright idea about how to handle it better during that period or I simply start fresh and I make progress whereas I was hitting a wall the night before or things were getting worse (dropping little scews or dropping the allen keys way too much whilst holding a CCD camera in the air with a ton of cables hanging off of it).

An example. The other night I was getting frustrated trying to square up my Trius camera on the Honders. Man it was elusive. Home made packers were not all the same which was making it a lot worse.
I got it to a point that seemed ok. Took a flat and there is a huge dust donut. So I need to clean the CCD window. I take off the camera and clean it. Big dust donut still there. OK maybe its on the filter. I loosen the filter retaining washer which has a tiny black screw (this is at night). Oh, the dust is on the other side of the filter. I have to remove it. The scope is pointing so the filter wants to fall out. Dangerous ground here. I loosen the tiny black screw ready to catch it with my hand whislt being careful the $300 filter does not fall to the ground. The tiny screw bounces off my hand and lands on the floor somewhere. Oh great.

I spent 15 minutes with a torch searching for that little screw. I have pavers surrounding the pier slab with gaps, there is a timber lining at the edge of the slab with a lsight gap, cables and transformers are on the floor and I cover these with foam tiles for walking and protection for gear if it ever fell. No luck.

Next morning in daytime I look. I lift up another foam tile further away, bang there is the tiny screw. Time spent - 15 seconds.

I would have had a hard time finding a match to replace that screw as its imperial being a US product and it could've made my filter wheel inoperative until I found one.

This leave it when getting frustrated and coming back fresh approach has helped a lot of times so I thought I would pass it on as sometimes this hobby is very frustrating debugging gear that won't work.

Greg