QHY178c not responsive in RAW16 mode

[brushpilot]

I did a Sensor Analysis in RAW8 mode and all went well but when I tried to follow up in RAW16 mode things got wonky. There was no image formed and when I tried to do a Snapshot, Sharpcap informed me it had failed and then became unresponsive. I quit Sharpcap, restarted and still no RAW 16 image but after walking away for a minute I returned to find the camera making an image and I had done nothing. When I then tried Sensor Analysis the dialogue started but the histogram panel was pure white and Sharpcap was once again unresponsive.

I had no idea whether the camera or SC was the problem so I started it in NINA which connected immediately and defaulted to 16 bit mode. I then made a quick capture which was successful.

Any thoughts would be appreciated,

Brian

[brushpilot]

... the plot thickens.
I had posted last year about trouble with my QHY cameras and getting Live view to work after connecting. The workaround was to go out of Live View and do a Framing Shot which would work and then a return to Live View would in most cases work properly.
Just for giggles, I did this again with the 178c and RAW16 was working and I was able to start Sensor Analysis, which for the first few seconds showed an all white histogram and then became responsive in a normal fashion.
I don't know if this helps in the sleuthing.
To add to the silliness, the 178c (older model) usually didn't need this workaround it was the 247c which was almost always balky. Today the behaviour was reversed. No problem with the 247 – it was the 178 giving me grief.

Head scratcher.

Brian

[admin]

Hi Brian,

I happened to have a QHY178C sitting on my desk as I read your post, so I plugged it in and tried running through a sensor analysis on it in RAW16. It worked fine - which doesn't really help explain why you are having problems

What do you have your USB traffic control set to? The default of 50 gives low frame rates but is usually pretty stable. Taking it lower increases the frame rate but that can be at the cost of the sort of intermittent stability issues that you are running into. That said, I have just run a second analysis at USB Traffic=5 with no problem.

Based on your report, it looks like the primary problem you have is the camera only responding intermittently in RAW16, which is causing problems regardless of whether you try a sensor analysis or not (maybe the sensor analysis just speeds up the problem appearing). Based on that, the right approach is to try to get the camera to behave reliably without worrying about the analysis and then try the analysis when it is working OK. I would certainly have a go with the steps on our USB troubleshooting page (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=349&p=1556#p1556) to see if any of those help get the camera running reliably. If you can find a setup that runs reliably then it is relatively easy to go back to your normal setup one change at a time and work out which change it is that causes things to break.

Hopes this helps,

Robin

[brushpilot]

Thanks Robin,

I'm familiar with the USB trouble shooting thread and checked on those issues. Both cameras were run with the same 2 meter USB 3 cable from the same computer port – one camera worked in RAW 16, one didn't. The 247c is a much bigger sensor with greater data throughput and it didn't miss a beat.I left the 178's USB traffic at the default 50. Both USB ports on the cameras appear clean and tight. I've been wrong before but I don't see this as a USB issue (maybe).

The workaround I tried and had success with was the same procedure needed to sometimes get a QHY camera working in Live View so my money is on the bet that it is some kind of software SDK/recognition issue although it being an intermittent issue leaves me pondering. That part sounds like connectivity failure. Hmm-mm...

When Sharpcap became frozen and unresponsive it wouldn't generate a Bug Report to you so I guess my next step is to try and replicate the situation and look at the log. Too busy this next week to do much about that.
I should have included in the first post that this is all being done on an HP Mini Desktop, i7, 16 GB Ram and Windows 10 Pro with no other processes at the same time, if one can say that about Windows.

Thanks for the help,
Brian

[admin]

Hi Brian,

I guess the next thing to do (if possible) is to try a different PC with identical software setup to see if that behaves the same way or not - that will either point to some hardware incompatibility or largely rule it out if both PCs fail. It would also be worth going back to older versions of SharpCap in case a recent update (either to SharpCap code or QHY code) has caused the issue. If you look at the SharpCap downloads page and find the versions that list 'QHY SDK Update' and then try the version *before* the SDK update version you can skip through fairly quickly.

I did deal with some crash reports related to QHY cameras in this last update - what was happening was that the camera had timed out producing a frame (already a bad sign). SharpCap was attempting to recover the situation by stopping/restarting the camera, but that fails too. At that point a bug report was being created, which was really incorrect, since it's not looking like a SharpCap bug that needs reporting to me, more a failure of the camera that needs to be reported to the user.

cheers,

Robin