Titan Problems...

[fatwoul]

Hi all,

Until recently, I have been using two XP(32) PCs in my observatory - one for guiding with Atik Titan, and one for imaging with Atik 4000 Mono + EFW2.  However, the goal is to make it all work via one PC, as I wish to have the option to dither automatically, and monitor the processes via Radmin from my house PC.

I have never been able to get both cameras to operate reliably on one PC.

On XP, introducing the Titan to the mix would always cause whatever programme was running the Titan to crash (MaximDL, Artemis or PHD), but the 4000 would always remain solid, and not crash regardless what was running it.

I thought maybe the computer was simply not up to the job, and it was due for an upgrade anyway, so that was done 10 days ago - it is now a Win7(64) machine, with 8GB of RAM.  Now, both cameras will USUALLY start up fine, but the Titan eventually stops running properly.  After about 20 minutes of perfect operation, the Titan appears to start looping exposures of 0 seconds, giving a completely black image with no noise to suggest anything is happening.

Both cameras and the EFW2 are running through a HitecAstro Mount Hub Pro, which is a powered hub.  However, the problem persists if the Titan is plugged into the PC directly.

I'd really like to get this to work as it would make everything so much simpler, and with the winter coming up it'd be great to be able to finally monitor the early hours from indoors.

[jonathan]

Hello,

We have had problems with Titans operating in parallel with other cameras, and to get around this we implemented a locking scheme which is used to prevent different programs from interfering with one another's cameras. This was done just over two years ago (it went into version 3.19 of Capture), so it should certainly be in the software that you are running. However, it does rely on both cameras being connected and switched on before starting the software (eg Capture) - this is because the locks are based on USB ids, and these can change when different devices are connected or disconnected. We have had a recent report of a similar issue when PHD and Capture are used together, which I am currently looking into. It is difficult to understand why the Titan should fail after 20 minutes of perfect operation - the problems we have seen occur when a program (eg Capture) is launched and tries to communicate with a camera which is already in use. Could anything be happening 20 minutes into your imaging session (eg another device being connected or disconnected) that might explain it?

Best regards,

Jonathan
(Atik)