SharpCap Forums

Hello, today has been the first chance to try out my new ZWO ASI 120mc camera. I started up my laptop (HP Pavillion running Windows 7) started Sharpcap then plugged in the camera, the camera was there on the ‘cameras’button so I ‘unsuccessfully’ tried to achieve focus, when the screen went blank, just as it does before you connect your camera, I tried a number of times to search and reconnect but to no avail so I shut everything down and started again but nothing. There was a message in the bar bottom left that said ‘detecting cameras’ I waited for maybe half an hour but nothing. So I did it all again still it would not detect the camera. The camera is brand new and it is the first time out of the box. Any ideas what has occurred?? The skies have now clouded over.

Sounds like the USB connection to the camera was lost - in some circumstances the ZWO SDK tells SharpCap that the camera has gone and you end up with the camera closing down on you as you describe. To be honest the most usual case though is that the SDK doesn't notice it's gone and you get a crash after a while...

Anyway, check that the camera is still showing up correctly in device manager - in future don't worry about waiting when it says detecting cameras (that should really go away very shortly, but obviously didn't in this case). Recovery steps would likely be

* Close and re-open sharpcap
if that fails then
* Close and re-open, pull and re-plug the camera when SharpCap closed
if that still fails then
* Pull and re-plug the camera, then reboot.

If the camera is not showing up correctly in device manager then you either have a driver issue or a connectivity issue - SharpCap will not see the camera in this state until you have sorted the underlying problem.

cheers,

Robin

PS - check out the post on troubleshooting USB issues too. viewtopic.php?f=18&t=349