I just received my brand new ZWO ASI2400MC Pro camera and have been capturing darks at with the cooler on. I have had some random problems where the SharpCap has lost connection with the camera. Its happened two or three times now over about 20 hours of on time testing and collection darks. When this happens, the camera cooler turns off, and SharpCap then SharpCap seems to try to reconnect. However, when its done, it sometimes (maybe always, not sure) seemed to end of with the camera floating palette completely blank, so SC doesn't fully recover gracefully. I have to click on the camera in the camera menu, which disconnects the camera again and then the camera panel refreshes properly the cooler restarts again and eventually things get back to normal once the cooler comes down to temp.
I have attached the pertinent log section. It seems to happen during running a cooler-on sequence, or shortly afterwards when I start trying to run a dark capture sequence script. It doesn't seem to fail while I am actually capturing darks. In the log, SharpCap thinks it has successfully reconnected, which would be true, I think, If the camera palette properly refreshed instead of just being blank.
Kinda concerned, as I don't know if there is something wrong with my new camera, or the power supply brick I've attached to it (maybe it cuts out sometimes), or SharpCap isn't playing nice with the camera because I haven't set something important in SharpCap settings that will make this camera work reliably. I sense that it does have something to do with my actions at the computer, and not a random hardware thing.
This is running with 4.1.13043.0.
Problem when SharpCap auto-restarts camera
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*** Please do not post license keys - please report any problems with licensing to 'admin' by private message ***
Please include the following details in any bug report:
* Version of SharpCap
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[If SharpCap crashes, please send the bug report when prompted instead of including the log]
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lowenthalm
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Problem when SharpCap auto-restarts camera
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Re: Problem when SharpCap auto-restarts camera
Hi,
what's happening is that the camera is failing to produce a frame - looks like you are set to 120s and the timeout allows an extra 26s before giving up waiting. When the timeout occurs at this sort of exposure length, SharpCap goes through a partial restart of the camera to try to get frames going again, and as you note, it looks like that partially succeeds.
The best approach here is going to be to try to stop the frames from being lost in the first place - all of the recovery that SharpCap attempts is really done on a "it's worth trying, but it might not work all the time" level, since SharpCap is trying to recover from something unknown having gone wrong inside the camera, camera driver or camera SDK.
My first suggestion would be to turn the 'Turbo USB' setting off of auto and wind it down to the minimum value (usually 40 on ZWO cameras). That will increase the time taken to transfer frames from the camera, but is usually good at reducing the chance of lost frames.
The other thing worth following up is your idea about the power supply - if that is struggling when the camera is cooling down (highest load at that point due to high cooler power) then maybe that could be the underlying cause of the problem.
cheers,
Robin
what's happening is that the camera is failing to produce a frame - looks like you are set to 120s and the timeout allows an extra 26s before giving up waiting. When the timeout occurs at this sort of exposure length, SharpCap goes through a partial restart of the camera to try to get frames going again, and as you note, it looks like that partially succeeds.
The best approach here is going to be to try to stop the frames from being lost in the first place - all of the recovery that SharpCap attempts is really done on a "it's worth trying, but it might not work all the time" level, since SharpCap is trying to recover from something unknown having gone wrong inside the camera, camera driver or camera SDK.
My first suggestion would be to turn the 'Turbo USB' setting off of auto and wind it down to the minimum value (usually 40 on ZWO cameras). That will increase the time taken to transfer frames from the camera, but is usually good at reducing the chance of lost frames.
The other thing worth following up is your idea about the power supply - if that is struggling when the camera is cooling down (highest load at that point due to high cooler power) then maybe that could be the underlying cause of the problem.
cheers,
Robin