Possible USB issues around 13170&previous

[celkins]

Robin,
@Jean-Francois mentioned elsewhere that he'd been having issues with his QHY715 camera: maybe coincidence, but last week (sorry, can't be precise, personal reasons - better half in hospital...), I started getting USB issues on my rig, which hasn't been touched in probably over 2 years (USB cabling): I put it down to heavy dew which had covered everything, and then froze on some surfaces, so started by opening up USB joints, spraying with WD40, and then re-seating each a couple of times. This seemed to help, but ZWO 183MM (tonight's log attached) started showing weird picture artifacts which I can best describe as if the frame buffer start pointer was messed up, and appearing as banded rotation within the frame. Then the cloud rolled in

On to tonight, first clear one since: with weird frame rotation issue was there on mono, not on colour, so I power cycled the camera: no change; checked USB connections - no change: wound down the USB speed setting for both cameras (they share a USB hub & path back to the PC - it's worked like this with USB speed on 80 since I started using SharpCap, 4/5 years ago, until last week...) Now they are both working, but with USB speed at 40, the minimum.

Only the mono camera showed a problem on screen, but nothing apparent to me in the logs - looks like successful frame transfers, they just weren't right on-screen.

Any thoughts?

Carl

[admin]

Hi Carl,

my suspicions for something like this would lie with the ZWO SDK update that I included with version 4.1.13152, so it would be worth trying that version and the previous (4.1.13131) to see if the newer one has the issue and the older one works fine.

The fact that it varies with USB setting really points to it being ZWO specific, and the SharpCap code for ZWO hasn't changed significantly for quite a while, so the SDK is definitely the first thing to investigate.

cheers,

Robin

[celkins]

Hi, Robin,
I finally got to try this, and reverting to .13131 doesn't fix the problem: the only other astro-related change in the timeframe is that I upgraded ASCOM6.52 to 7...

Time to revert this, then... I'll let you know!

Cheers,
Carl

[celkins]

well, reverting to ASCOM 6.6.2 and rebooting doesn't fix it, either...

It does seem sensitive as to whether the pointer is moving within the SharpCap window - glitching is more prevalent if I wave to mouse around the window, rather than either over another window, or off screen...

Cheers,
Carl

[admin]

Hi Carl,

OK, so I guess we now need to check 3 or 4 possibilities...

1) Cable deterioration - try with a different USB cable straight back to the PC, also try different ports. If you can make the camera work fine like that then - one change at a time - work back to your normal config and see at what point the problem re-appears.

2) Older changes in SharpCap - if you are lucky your downloads folder may still have older SharpCap downloads you have used in the past. Try going back through those versions and see if any make the problem go away.

3) Other software updates - Ascom is unlikely to be an issue, but ZWO drivers or general Windows updates just maybe. Difficult to check this one.

4) Hardware (camera) problems - if the issue shows up on another PC with different cables, etc, this needs to be considered.

cheers,

Robin

[celkins]

I'll have to wait until my head's a little clearer before I can tackle this, sorry...