QHY600L - Sensor Analysis Very Slow

[MidnightLightning]

Hi,

I just purchased Sharpcap Pro so am an absolute noob and am trying to run sensor analysis.

After a few issues initially it ran it for a few hours before it eventually failed with an error and I am now running it again. It does seem to be running at the moment but it is very slow.

The question is, should it take so long to run, I see the frame rate is only 0.1 FPS ?

I am finding when imaging with the ASCOM driver in SGPro downloads take around 15s but I'm not sure which driver it is using in Sharpcap. I cant remember what drivers I installed when I got the camera but it included the QHY All in One Driver and the ASCOM driver.

Any help would be appreciated.

[admin]

Hi,

the first thing to do is to take the sensor analysis out of the equation and to test the camera without it - use exposures between 0.01s and 1.00s (in 16 bit mode) and see what frame rates you get. You may need to adjust the 'USB Traffic' control down to increase the frame rate.

If you are getting decent frame rates (5+fps for short exposures, ~1fps for 1 second exposures), then try again. If it starts to run slowly again then look at the exposure - 0.1fps is OK if the exposure is 5-10 seconds, but sensor analysis should not go beyond 2s. Sometimes 0.1fps can be a sign that the camera has stopped responding (leave it long enough and it will drop to 0.0fps). Keep an eye on the frame counts in the bottom left.

Sensor analysis should usually take less than 5 minues.

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Oh, one more thing...

you can usually increase the frame rate by using a smaller area for capturing (often called ROI - region of interest). Set the 'Capture Area' control to a smaller value - perhaps half the maximum in each direction.

Robin

[turfpit]

You could try working through this viewtopic.php?f=35&t=2590. Use the camera plugged directly into capture machine and can be performed during the day, in the house & no scope needed.

Dave

[MidnightLightning]

Thanks for the suggestions and the information on USB Traffic - very helpful. Apologies for the slow response, I have been trying to get it working today without success. I managed to run Sensor Analysis last night, it took 4 hours to run but today I was using a different laptop, much more powerful, and I had all sorts of issues. I can connect to my QHY600 using both the ASCOM and QHY drivers but I cant get any capture to run with the QHY driver and the ASCOM one was running at 0.1 FPS again. I ran the camera successfully in NINA, SGPro and EZCAP so I'm not sure why it wont run in Sharpcap, I suspect I'm doing something wrong so will take a look at the manual tonight

[admin]

Unfortunately I don't have the 600 to test with

Do make sure that you have the very latest SharpCap (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads) - there have been lots of updates from QHY recently, which may be particularly relevant as you are using a new camera. Also consider setting the option to 'Force Still Mode' to on (if you have that option).

Robin

[MidnightLightning]

Thanks Robin. I'm still having issues so will reinstall Sharpcap and the QHY drivers and se if that helps.

[MidnightLightning]

I managed to get to c.1 FPS by setting capture area to 800x600 and USB Traffic to 0. Still slow but ran sensor analysis in around 40 minutes. Maybe its the QHY600 large sensor that is the issue - 120MB downloads for full frame exposure. Anyway, job done for now.

[admin]

Hi,

good to hear that you have had some success now. It would be interesting to see what sort of frame rates other users of this camera are getting.

cheers,

Robin

[tc.astro]

Since you asked - with a QHY600C-PH and 800x600 and USB Traffic 0 I'm getting 0.5fps.

My problem is that I'm only getting partial cooling - I have started a topic for this.