183M having random download issues
Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 6:54 pm
Hello,
I have 183m and have noticed some strange behavior. Notably, when I switch modes from mono8 to mono16, sometimes the camera will begin to slow down or stop and generally work erratically. Specifically, if I am capturing at 1s and frames are happily downloading, if I make the above change, the camera often seems to stop or take up to 2-3 minutes to resume downloading. Sometimes, it never recovers. The only way I have been able to restore some kind of 'normal' behavior is to toggle on and off the DDR option. This often 'kick starts' it again, but not always. Sometimes after toggling the DDR, it will work for 3 frames and then begin slowing down again to 1-2 minutes per frame (the frame counter for a 2 second exposure will show something like 3:02|-3.00 or worse). It's like the read from the camera is hung.
No amount of fiddling with the USB traffic or anything else will get things back on track.Even 're-connecting' the camera won't help. Even restarting SharpCap doesn't always work either short of disconnecting the USB port.
I have noticed a slightly more stability with DDR off, but that's only useful for longer exposures, anything shorter than a second and things obviously become unusable. That leads me to suspect something is not quite right with the DDR implementation.I may be wrong.
It's strange because I can get 152fps at mono8 at 1024x768 but sometimes when exposures exceed 2 seconds, it's starts going strange. For example, a 60 second exposure will start taking 2 minutes to download (4:10|-2:10) etc. Other times, the exposures seem to work as expected. It's somewhat random. It could work fine for 1 hour, then make a change to something and oops... back to taking minutes to download seconds long exposures.
Forcing Still Mode has no effect, in fact, it causes SharpCap to crash on occasion, so I stopped playing with it.
I don't know if it's the drivers (latest being used) or elsewhere. However, if I use the camera in TheSkyX via ASCOM I never have any issues.
The camera is on a USB 3 port directly on the laptop, no other devices.
Any insights?
Thanks
I have 183m and have noticed some strange behavior. Notably, when I switch modes from mono8 to mono16, sometimes the camera will begin to slow down or stop and generally work erratically. Specifically, if I am capturing at 1s and frames are happily downloading, if I make the above change, the camera often seems to stop or take up to 2-3 minutes to resume downloading. Sometimes, it never recovers. The only way I have been able to restore some kind of 'normal' behavior is to toggle on and off the DDR option. This often 'kick starts' it again, but not always. Sometimes after toggling the DDR, it will work for 3 frames and then begin slowing down again to 1-2 minutes per frame (the frame counter for a 2 second exposure will show something like 3:02|-3.00 or worse). It's like the read from the camera is hung.
No amount of fiddling with the USB traffic or anything else will get things back on track.Even 're-connecting' the camera won't help. Even restarting SharpCap doesn't always work either short of disconnecting the USB port.
I have noticed a slightly more stability with DDR off, but that's only useful for longer exposures, anything shorter than a second and things obviously become unusable. That leads me to suspect something is not quite right with the DDR implementation.I may be wrong.
It's strange because I can get 152fps at mono8 at 1024x768 but sometimes when exposures exceed 2 seconds, it's starts going strange. For example, a 60 second exposure will start taking 2 minutes to download (4:10|-2:10) etc. Other times, the exposures seem to work as expected. It's somewhat random. It could work fine for 1 hour, then make a change to something and oops... back to taking minutes to download seconds long exposures.
Forcing Still Mode has no effect, in fact, it causes SharpCap to crash on occasion, so I stopped playing with it.
I don't know if it's the drivers (latest being used) or elsewhere. However, if I use the camera in TheSkyX via ASCOM I never have any issues.
The camera is on a USB 3 port directly on the laptop, no other devices.
Any insights?
Thanks