Camera remains in connection

[admin]

Hi,

ok, right...

some of the issues that you are noting are just that SharpCap is doing things a bit differently, including

* If SharpCap recognizes the camera sensor from the model name then it can hide the LCG/HCG switchover into the gain control - that means that there is no manual HCG/LCG control and that the gain will have a higher range

* The USB speed change is one made by ToupTek last year some time - the wider range of 0..9 gives finer control over this setting than the old 0..2 range

The latest Omegon SDK I can find on their web site is Jan 2023, whereas I have a ToupTek SDK from Nov 2023, so at the moment the TT SDK is ahead.

I think the best thing to try to do is to work out the particular issues like low/zero frame rates if possible (understanding settings that might lead to them, look at some logs, etc).

cheers,

Robin

[StarFlea]

Hi Robin,

Could you please tell me the two download addresses where you can find the two SDKs.
Apparently I can only find old versions...

Maybe I can even find newer drivers there!?

[admin]

Hi,

I found the Omegon SDK via the download link on this page : https://www.omegon.eu/astronomical-came ... or/p,67320

The ToupTek one I get direct from them, so no download link, sorry. The DLLs from that version are in the latest SharpCap though.

Interestingly, you do not need (should not need) drivers for most ToupTek made cameras on Windows 10 or 11 (maybe even 8?) - they will work without. There is a generic Microsoft driver called WinUSB.sys that the cameras can use instead of the toupcam.sys driver. In either case, the driver does practically nothing except allow data to flow between the SDK and the camera, so updating the driver is incredibly unlikely to fix any issues. The latest version of toupcam.sys is from 2017 - the actual code in the driver basically never gets updated, all that gets changed is the list of models that it supports.

I found that when I set up a new PC with Windows 11 it was unhappy about the ToupTek driver because the digitial signature uses an old algorithm - with that driver installed some Win11 security features could not be turned on. That's when I discovered about the WinUSB side of things and that all but the very oldest cameras don't actually need the ToupTek/Omegon/Altair/Mallincam/etc driver.

cheers,

Robin

[StarFlea]

OK, I have now completely uninstalled the DShow driver!

Let's see if it's actually superfluous!?
But if this is a viable solution, then we can happily live without the OmegonSDK!