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ZWO failure

jambouk

By jambouk
in Discussions - Cameras

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jambouk

jambouk

Posted
Posted

Has anyone else encountered  a ZWO camera just stop working?

I was using it earlier to have a go at all sky imaging tonight and all was fine in SharpCap. I then tried using an active extension lead and it has stopped working and can't seem to be resurrected.

I've uninstalled drivers, software, reinstalled, used no extension leads and tried different USB leads (and tested these on other kit), tried USB 2 and 3 ports, rebooted countless times. tried two other laptops and a desktop.

In device manager it just appears as an unknown device and I can't update the driver from there as the drivers on the website are just a setup utility (http://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software/ASI120MC_Setup.exe).

Tried connecting without drivers installed and it fails to automatically identify the device.

I think this is what happened with my previous ZWO!

Has anyone else encountered this?

Thanks for any ideas.

James

ZWO ASI120MC (I've tried the -S version of the drivers too and the MM version, no joy).

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johnno

johnno

Posted
Posted

Funny enough, I just bought a asi178mc and it lasted about 1 minute and the preview screen went blank, but my pc see's the camera in device manager and the software see's the camera but it shows 0 fps.

Tried it on 3 different pc's with different OS's. I was using Firecapture at the time and was playing around with the settings when it threw a wobbler also tried it with Sharpcap and Amcap. 

I've also uninstalled and reinstalled everything and still the same, just waiting for a replacement to come, not a happy bunny

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JamesF

JamesF

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Well that doesn't look good.  The ZWO cameras all have vendor IDs of 03c3 and I think the 120MC should be 03c3:120b, not d282:5303.

I wonder if the firmware has got mangled somehow.  Could be worth contacting ZWO and asking if there's any way you might be able to restore the firmware.

James

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JamesF

JamesF

Posted
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Not with ZWO but I have 3 dead QHY5s in a draw here... Unrecognised device.

ChrisH

I meant to add a comment to this earlier.

QHY use the Cypress USB chipset for their cameras (I think it actually combines a USB interface and a microcontroller to manage any peripheral that you'd like it to), as do ZWO.  The system can store a copy of firmware on-board, but it's also possible to download new firmware to the device to update the on-board firmware or just to run from RAM instead of the on-board system.  ZWO use on-board firmware as far as I'm aware (at least most of the time) whilst QHY upload firmware to RAM each time the device is connected.

I wonder if there's some way that the default firmware on these devices can get corrupted and that's what's happened in these cases.  I have a vague recollection of a posting on QHY's forums (I can't check at the moment as they've been down for several months because of hacking) suggesting that it might be possible to reprogram the on-board firmware to recover the camera when this happens, but I can't remember much else at the moment.

James

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JamesF

JamesF

Posted
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Oooh, now here's a thought...  (just for the QHY cameras)

The way the QHY cameras work is that when initially connect the driver recognises the camera, downloads the new firmware into RAM and then the camera resets itself, reconnecting to the USB bus with a new vendor ID and product ID which the driver recognises as the "real" camera.

However, there's a separate utility that can be used to load firmware into these Cypress-based devices.  It doesn't have to be done by the driver.  The software is called "fxload" and it's part of the libusb package which I believe has been ported to Windows.  I use it with oaCapture for exactly this purpose on both OSX and Linux.  It can recognise which device to download the firmware to by using the VID and PID, so it doesn't matter if they're wrong.

I wonder if it might be possible to load the firmware into the camera manually using fxload and have it start working again?

James

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ChrisLX200

ChrisLX200

Posted
Posted

I meant to add a comment to this earlier.

QHY use the Cypress USB chipset for their cameras (I think it actually combines a USB interface and a microcontroller to manage any peripheral that you'd like it to), as do ZWO.  The system can store a copy of firmware on-board, but it's also possible to download new firmware to the device to update the on-board firmware or just to run from RAM instead of the on-board system.  ZWO use on-board firmware as far as I'm aware (at least most of the time) whilst QHY upload firmware to RAM each time the device is connected.

I wonder if there's some way that the default firmware on these devices can get corrupted and that's what's happened in these cases.  I have a vague recollection of a posting on QHY's forums (I can't check at the moment as they've been down for several months because of hacking) suggesting that it might be possible to reprogram the on-board firmware to recover the camera when this happens, but I can't remember much else at the moment.

James

James, if you want one to play with I'll mail it to you :-)

Cheers,

Chris

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JamesF

JamesF

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If you're happy to do that Chris I'd be more than willing to spend a bit of time on it to see if it might provide a way forward for those with QHY cameras that are no longer recognised.  I'll PM you.

James

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