Downloading and saving darks and flats issue

[JALabrecque]

Robin,

Hopefully I can give you enough info to help me with this.
Last night I was creating darks for the photography session. Setup was normal except I was using a USB3 cable to go from the camera USB3 to the USB2 plug on the mount. I usually use a USB2 cable to make that connection but it was not long enough. Not sure if that is important.
I then set the camera and darks settings as usual. Started darks capture and everything seemed normal. It took the 10 shots and averaged and then the program just sat. No error message. It normally downloads quickly after averaging into both the capture folder and the preprocessing box in the program. After waiting a long time I attempted to get out of the darks session and the program was locked up. I had to go into program manager to shut down SharpCap. There was nothing saved in the Captures folder. The only "error" message I ever got was that the camera did not shut down when instructed to by SharpCap.
Next I went to do flats. Again everything was normal in terms of settings and the histogram of the light panel was at 50%. Started the flats capture and the histogram was showing very low light and took two shots and then froze. Again I had to go to program manager to shut down the SharpCap program.
I went thru the same procedures on both darks and flats several times last night and again this afternoon with the same results.
I had upgraded SharpCap to the latest rev a week ago seeing that one of the issues it had resolved was a flat issue. I then loaded ver 4.0.8765 last night which had always worked fine with no improvement.
Let me know if you need more info - I am at a loss.

John Labrecque

[JALabrecque]

Robin,

Lo and behold it was the substituted cable. Everything is working again. Cabling - the curse of astronomers!

John L.

[admin]

Hi John,

glad you found the cause. I have found that USB3 cables start to give issues when the total length without a hub gets above 3-3.5m. USB2 can often get close to 5m without needing a hub. Of course on top of that you always have the chance of just a bad cable

cheers,

Robin