SharpCap Forums

I seem to be having a little trouble with Sharpcap and my camera. The problems occurred in the heat of battle during imaging sessions so probably didn't get as much diagnostic information as I should, but this is basically what happens:

I'm running Sharpcap 3.1, a Zwo 224C camera, new USB 3.0 cable, with an Intel NUC computer (i5-7260, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). I connect to the NUC via remote desktop running on an iPad Pro. I've attached some error logs from recent events. Basically I find that everything is normally running fine and displaying a live image, but occasionally Sharpcap will freeze and I have to close it down and restart it. Then everything is fine again. I've also noted that it will freeze sometimes if I change the binning value, or capture region. I think it also froze once when I was playing around with trying to connect an Ascom mount. I've enclosed a couple of logs. The issues occur at least once every session.

A couple of other things, if I select the night colours the main window goes red, but if you select menus or start capture they are in original bright colours. Also, is there a switch to toggle this mode on the main window? Also, I'm using Sharpcap on an iPad with an Apple pencil, and I find the region selection for camera resolution very difficult, if not impossible to carry out, with the pencil. I can select a smaller sensor area, but cannot move it around in the small box.

Graham

Hi,

both of your attachments are bugs relating to Altair cameras, so probably not relevant to your current issue - they both look like what you see when the camera has (unexpectedly) stopped responding to the PC. To be honest though, the symptoms you are describing sound similar - that the ZWO camera has stopped responding - sometimes this leads to an error and sometimes the program gets stuck trying to send a message to the camera (change resolution/exposure/gain etc) that never completes.

I recently updated the ZWO SDK used in SharpCap, so depending on exactly which version you are using (3.1.5180 - new SDK, 3.1.5174 and below - old SDK) I'd recommend either upgrading to latest (to see if the new SDK helps) or downgrading (in case the new SDK is breaking things).

Night mode - yes, this is rather a nasty hack in the current versions of SharpCap dating back several years. I have just re-written it for SharpCap 3.2, so watch out for that. I have also made some changes to the selection area movement - dragging it with shift gives finer control - although I don't know if this will help your use case much.

cheers,

Robin

I'm running 3.1.5125.0 at the moment. To be honest the problem seems to occur with both cameras (ZWO 224MC, Altair Hypercam 178M), although I tend to use the ZWO camera more. I'll try the upgrade at my next session.

Graham

Hmm,

thinking further, have you gone through the USB troubleshooting steps - in particular turning down USB speeds, removing extension cables, etc? The symptoms you describe sound a bit like the 'Turbo USB' setting being too high on the ZWO cam.

cheers,

Robin