Altair 290M catastrophic failure

[sbraybrooke]

When I load up my Altair 290M camera into Sharpcap V4.1 I get a catastrophic failure (see screen shot). If I open Altair capture it is fine. So I don't think it is the connection. Any Ideas please?

[admin]

Hi,

setting the speed is pretty much the first thing that SharpCap tries to do after opening the camera, so the failure is happening almost straight away after opening. One thing that can cause a failure at that point is if the camera is already open in another application - as mentioned in the error message in your screenshot. Is there any chance that you still had it open in AltairCapture (or another SharpCap, or other app) at the time you tried to open in it in SharpCap?

One thing that can sometimes happen is that an application can fail to close properly or crash and seem to have closed but actually still have the camera open in the background. A PC reboot or camera unplug and replug usually deals with that sort of issue - see if it works first thing tried after rebooting or plugging in the camera.

cheers,

Robin

[sbraybrooke]

Thanks Robin

Unplugging, rebooting, swapping, USB ports, and cables makes no difference. However, if I connect indirectly from Sharpcap using ASCOM it works fine. No other apps are running at all.

I see an option in settings for ZWO cameras to slow them down on start up. Can this be used on the Altair cameras at all? Or can I slow the ports down any other way?

[sbraybrooke]

Also, I tried it in PHD2 and it is fine. So both Altair Capture and PHD2 do not have the issue, and it also works OK indirectly from Sharpcap over ASCOM.It is just the direct connection from Sharpcap that is the problem.

[admin]

Hi,

OK, that's odd then. Can you check that you have the latest version of SharpCap 4.1 from our downloads page (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads) - that just helps rule out encountering an issue that might have been fixed in a SharpCap or Altair SDK update.

If the latest version fails, please try SharpCap 4.0 (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/sha ... -downloads) - sometimes an update can introduce a bug and by finding an older version that works you can start tracking down the change that caused the issue.

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Just an update -

I found I had a 290M here (attached to my guide scope), so I was able to test that with the latest version. I am seeing the same error about 90% of the time (once it worked, often I see two copies of the camera in the menu). Going back, it looks like an SDK update in April broke this camera - previous versions of the Altair SDK work fine, newer ones fail.

If you go back to a version of SharpCap 4.1 from before April 2nd this year (the full list of previous versions is available on our downloads page), it should work. If you want, you can copy the AltairCam.dll from an older version over the same file in the latest version, but if you do that you have to run SharpCap by double clicking the .exe file in the install folder, as using the normal desktop shortcut will trigger the install to 'repair' and put the newer, broken, altaircam.dll back.

I have spoken to Altair about this, hopefully we will have a new update soon which fixes this, but I don't have any timeline for this.

cheers,

Robin