QHY5III-178 issues with ASCOM drivers in PHD2

[SteveA]

Not had very much scope time recently, but with good conditions last night I headed out for some imaging......or so I thought!

I've had my new QHY5III-178 working as a guide cam and although I've not had very much use out of it this year initial performance looked quite promising. Thinking back to when I installed the software and first used the camera I did seem some connectivity issues, but I managed to work through them and got it working okay. So last night I started off by just adjusting the exposure on the camera from 1 second (where its been sitting since I set it up) up to 2 seconds...Bang!!! camera drops the connection. Played around for what seemed like an eternity changing settings and re-installing drivers, but no way will it stay connected when the exposure time is any greater than 1 second. Now that's fine I guess when the seeing is great...so its going to be a problem most of the time.

If I connect the camera with SharpCap using the native QHY5 drivers it works flawlesly, so I'm left thinking it maybe be an ASCOM driver issue?

My only other thoughts are that as this is a USB 3 camera and I only have USB 2 ports available that some how its a data transfer issue combined with ASCOM and maybe I should be looking at at least getting a USB 3 hub and/or some USB ports on my PC... Anyone got any thoughts on this one?

Steve

[SteveA]

I seem to at least have a work around for this, though long term I think l'm going to need to get some USB3 ports on my PC. I finally realised that when I have the QHY5III connected on its own, the PHD works fine with it irrespective of exposure length. As soon as as I connect my Atik 314, the connection drops!

Eventually I worked out that by connecting the QHY5III first, setting the USB traffic to 50 and setting a max exposure of 2 seconds I can then get the Atik to connect and keep both cameras working. It must be some kind of USB traffic/bandwidth/bottle neck problem some where!

Steve