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best camera for all sky use


Horwig

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I believe USB cables are supposed to use twisted pairs internally to mitigate the effects of external interference.  I think it's possible to get shielded USB cables  though (USB3 cables have to be, as far as I recall), so it might be worth trying one.

James

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Thanks James, the usb cable I cut up for my defunct qhy5 was screened. I assume they all are to some extent. The data cables are unbalanced though aren't they?

The 3m cable through the powered hub had been working well for a few hours, then I used remote desktop connect, which is how I normally work my obsy pc, EZP froze, not sure if it was a coincidence, will keep experimenting.

Huw

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Long detailed posts ! :) .. Initially I tend to skip, and then later come back too read in detail - yes I know, none of us are 'perfect' ;)

Anyway, not knowing if the exact problem has yet been discovered, if the user interface is locking up/crashing, then the user interface software needs fixing ..

1) so as not to crash or lock up

2) too provide any information it can as to it's reason for not receiving/getting/wanting to not exist anymore

The author is the one person who can help (if they are willing).

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Any reason for Remote Desktop connection to upset the camera, second time now for it to be running for a few hours localy, then connect remotely, and freezes within a short while.

H

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Apart from James's question, my thinking would be too wonder if the author has set error timeouts shorter than they expected the case too be, or infact, they have as yet learnt too set error timeouts when calling software/firmware/OS-drivers (thread based or otherwise).

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James, have been running 2 second exposures using remote desktop for quite a while, no problems. Then went down to millisecond exposures and eventually everything froze. went back to 2 second exposures, and everything has been good again.

Why should remote desktop upset everything|? It runs on microsecond exposures quite happily without remote access.

Huw

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To be honest I don't know what the exact cause of the problem is, but it doesn't surprise me that with a high displayed frame rate something goes wrong somewhere.  Basically you have a low bandwidth connection (relatively speaking) between the two PCs and you're trying to compress and stuff a lot of data down it because of the high frequency of the screen updates.  For the sake of argument, let's say you're doing 25fps to the display at 1280x960.  That's about 700Mb/s in 24bpp colour.  Something will have to give somewhere :)

I don't know if EZP or any of the other Windows capture applications can do it, but if it's possible to lower the displayed frame rate whilst still saving data at whatever frame rate you want, that might be a way out of the problem.

James

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I don't know if EZP or any of the other Windows capture applications can do it, but if it's possible to lower the displayed frame rate whilst still saving data at whatever frame rate you want, that might be a way out of the problem.

James, the technique is simply to give highest priority to the thread that saves the incoming data directly to disk. The display (and any other) thread gets a very low priority.

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Thanks James, I take it that team viewer would have the same problem? What about the broadcast aspect of EZP, I've idea how that works?

I'm now scared of using the all sky cam on the same pc as the imaging kit in the obsy, it's so unreliable, I don't want to jeopardise an imaging run just fro the all sky cam, I'm tempted to run it on its own pc.

Huw

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Yes, I think that's a good idea :)  I'm planning to run my all sky cam from a separate laptop.  Once James releases his next version of oaCapture which will handle long exposures (above the current max of 10s) I shall be changing to my old Dell laptop which has Linux Mint on it and use oaCapture for the all sky cam.  I'll rewrite my current Visual Basic front end app in Python which is a multi-platform language.

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keeping thge exposure longer than half a second seems to be stable over remote desktop connection. That's still on the obsy pc. Will leave it running overnight, and try the dell pc in the morning.

Nite all.

Sorry Gina, posted at the same time as you. The Dell at the moment has no hard drive, was going to transfer the ssd from the obsy pc, which is win7 64, I have the old hard drive I removed from the obsy pc still, win7 32 to return to it.

Huw

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Should be alright then.  As long as the PC has proper USB2 protocols.  As I recall it was Win versions earlier than XP that had some USB problems.

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Dell Optiplex 160 usff pc working nice and stable with the qhy on Win 7 32. Wish I could say the same for using it with remote desktop, freezes all the while.

Looks like tdnicholls way is the way to go using something like Blue Iris cctv software to monitor. Trouble is, doesn't seem like there's a free period with the software, and my pc is probably at the bottom end of the performance required.

Huw

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Blue Iris has a 15 day trial period if you want to try it out.

Had a load of problems with mine locking up recently, traced it back to the USB connection on the PC, used some contact cleaner on both plug and socket and been stable for over 2 days now.

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Blue Iris has a 15 day trial period if you want to try it out.

Had a load of problems with mine locking up recently, traced it back to the USB connection on the PC, used some contact cleaner on both plug and socket and been stable for over 2 days now.

Thanks, will give it a go then. Yes, the camera looks to be very dependant on the usb cable and connection.

Huw

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BlueIris seems to work well. Can't get it to see EZP broadcast, but it controls the camera locally, and I can view it on the web browser on any other PC.

Huw

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BlueIris seems to work well. Can't get it to see EZP broadcast, but it controls the camera locally, and I can view it on the web browser on any other PC.

Huw

I have configured like this to access the Live Broadcast

Screenshot%202015-05-02%2017.26.59_zpskl

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Thanks Trevor, unfortunately, doing it that way maxed out my cpu at 100%, and after a while it all froze. I'm going to give it a go just with blue iris, I can always use remote desktop to set the exposure and gain, and then the web service to view.

Huw

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