SharpCap Forums

Robin,
You recently updated sc in regards to the fwhm measurement. The first change and the fwhm was very large. The second version is better but still very sensitive. When installing both of these versions my 533 camera began having trouble. When changing profiles it takes much longer. Once in a while I get a message the camera is disconnected. I turned the turbo all the way down but no difference. I had no issues before the sc versions. Is there something I can do or should I go back to older version.
Thanks for your help

Hi George,

the last time I changed anything that would be relevant to your ZWO camera was when I included a new ZWO SDK - this was in version 4.1.13152 released on 24th February. So, if it is a change in SharpCap causing any different behaviour with the ZWO camera, you would need to try going back to 4.1.13131 to see if that helps.

If the versions you have been on recently that didn't show the problem were newer than that, then you already had the latest ZWO code, so it's unlikely that the stability issues you are seeing are related to a change in SharpCap itself.

cheers,

Robin

Robin,
I installed the latest ascom and asi drivers but no luck. I went back to 4.1.13251.0 and all is well. My laptop is about 10 years old with a i3-5010u processor. I upped the ram to 16g and changed to a ssd. I think maybe the machine can’t keep up. Working well now.

Hi,

I presume that you have gone back to 13251 from 13268, in which case any change is very strange. The differences between those two versions are largely around star detection/FWHM measurement and a few bug fixes in random places in the code. For general capturing images from a camera and saving them to disk, there should be no real difference. Certainly nothing that should disconnect the camera.

Are you doing anything that causes SharpCap to do star detection (for example : deep sky live stacking, focus, etc) when the problems happen? Or is it just at any point?

cheers,

Robin

Robin,
The problem is while live stacking dso. What really caused the problem regularly, was if I was using the focus tool with maybe a 1 sec exposure. Then I switched back to my normal 30 sec exposure by changing profiles . It would either take a long time to change or freeze up the program. I then had to pull camera plug and restart sc.

Ah, interesting... that sounds like the CPU is struggling to keep up with all the work that is going on.

If you can send me the log from one of the problem sessions then I will check to see whether it has recorded any useful info about what was taking all the time (SharpCap does try to record that sort of info when it detects the UI becoming unresponsive).

Things that you can do to try to reduce the problem temporarily:

* Longer exposures (ie 2s for focusing) - alternative try bin2 for focusing so less data to process

* Reduce the star detection sensitivity (higher sensitivities make the computations for star detection take longer)

cheers,

Robin

Robin,
Thanks for the tips. All is working fine now. I think it’s about time to look at a newer machine