Kevin Kight replied to the topic 'QHY 533M help' in the forum. 3 months ago

Hi Magnus,

Your suggestion got me thinking and after more troubleshooting and 2 successful nights I can declare that I have a working rig. Thank you!

For the benefit of anyone who happens to run into a similar issue of camera hang and dropout, here is what I did to get a working imaging rig.

Short version: Use USB2 cables only between the rig and computer.

Long version:

As far as I can tell, for whatever reason, USB3 was problematic and resulting in hanging and disconnects with the provided cable from QHY and any alternate cables. Whether the issue lies with the camera hardware, the computer hardware (I tried a laptop, rasperry pi 4 and minipc all with and without a USB3 hub), or between the indi qhy driver and libusb (as the syslog seemed to suggest) is not clear. However, based on Magnus's reply, I decided to try and see if the issue was USB version related. To check this, I used a USB2 Type A male-female extension with the QHY-provided USB3 cable, and plugged it into both my laptop and my minipc. There were no dropouts, or hangs in a short 12 image test session on either computer that included LRGB filter changes using the 4 pin connector to the CFW3. It should be noted that this forced the camera to operate with the USB2 protocol and is limited to USB2 speeds as the extension lacks the extra wires found in USB3. With the QHY533, download times are still less than 1 second. Furthermore, the USB3 type B receptacle on the camera is hardware backwards compatible with USB2 type B connectors; the USB2 Type B end will plug into the larger side of the USB3 Type B receptacle that is on the camera and, due to plug geometry, this can only be done in one orientation. To avoid having an unnecessarily long connections to the minipc by chaining multiple USB cables, I used a 6 ft USB2 Type A- Type B between the camera and minipc. This setup of using only USB2 cables to connect the minipc to imaging and guide cameras, focuser and the mount (4 USB cables in total with no external hub) has worked over 2 nights, so I am declaring this to be a successful workaround. No need to disconnect and reconnect the camera when starting up. Due to the hardware of the QHY533M camera, the updated fxload package with fx3 capability is still required to load the camera firmware, regardless of the USB cable used.

- Kevin

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