Altair 294c: Same picture delivered multiple times according to the USB-Speed

[Ralph]

It sounds strange but I’ve really checked it several times: Try the following

1. connect the cam to an std lense, so you can make fotos of your computer screen and open e.g. Notepad … to make things easier, set the fontsize to > 100
2. type a “1” and take a single shot in NINA compare the picture to your screen
3. type a “2” and take s single shot in NINA compare the picture to your screen
4. … and so on …
5. If you always get the “current” number, change the USB-Speed limit … with my setup, the “slower” speeds caused the most issues with “2” it worked out mostl

Sometimes it only happened, when I was changing from “Loop”-Mode back to “single” shots.

This is quiet an issue with platesolving … NINA will run forever, trying to center the target …

Cheers,

Ralph

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[Sebastien Menot]

Hello, I can report the same issue with my Altair 294C.

[Stefan B]

A new options is available for altair cameras to flush the image cache. This will be available soon in the nightly builds to try out and hopefully fix this problem.

[Stefan B]

Does this problem still occur in the latest 1.11 Nightly?

[Sebastien Menot]

Hello Stefan ! Thank for your feedback. I was running 1.10 HF1 until now. I tried HF2 last week, and but it crashed as soon as I connected the Altair 294C. Then I have reinstalled HF1 and I lost all my parameters. So I had to reinstall everything. So I am hesitating a bit to move on 1.11 Nightly. Does the crash issue with Altair corrected on 1.11 Nightly ?

[Stefan B]

Well for your production environment i would not recommend to jump on the nightly builds, as there are drastic changes overall. However the potential fix for it is there and you could do a simple test on a different rig, if the problem persists. I’m not aware of crashes.

[Sebastien Menot]

Hi Stephan, my crashes was similar to https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina/issues/755/altair-294c-pro-tec

[Ralph]

Hi Stefan,
I’ve created a virtual Box from my Surface I use for NINA. starting from this snapshot I tried the #49 nightly. It even doesn’t list the Altair Cam.
I tried both new drivers I found on https://www.altairastro.help/ (the 4.10 and 4.11). Nothing worked.

[Stefan B]

Can you attach your logfile? There might be a hint why it is not showing.

[Ralph]

I think the interesting part is this:

DATE|LEVEL|SOURCE|MEMBER|LINE|MESSAGE
2021-02-27T18:05:19.3806|TRACE|CameraChooserVM.cs|GetEquipment|44|Adding ASI Cameras
2021-02-27T18:05:19.3853|TRACE|CameraChooserVM.cs|GetEquipment|58|Adding Altair Cameras
2021-02-27T18:05:19.3864|ERROR|DllLoader.cs|LoadDll|48|DllLoader failed to load library C:\Program Files\N.I.N.A. - Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy\External\x64\Altair\altaircam.dll due to error code 126
2021-02-27T18:05:19.3954|ERROR|CameraChooserVM.cs|GetEquipment|64|Unable to load DLL 'altaircam.dll': Das angegebene Modul wurde nicht gefunden. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)      at Altair.AltairCam.Altaircam_EnumV2(IntPtr ti)
   at Altair.AltairCam.EnumV2()
   at NINA.ViewModel.Equipment.Camera.CameraChooserVM.GetEquipment()
2021-02-27T18:05:19.3960|TRACE|CameraChooserVM.cs|GetEquipment|69|Adding Atik Cameras
2021-02-27T18:05:19.7065|TRACE|AtikCameraDll.cs|GetDevicesCount|21|Number of Atik Cameras: 0
2021-02-27T18:05:19.7065|TRACE|CameraChooserVM.cs|GetEquipment|71|Cameras found: 0

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[Stefan B]

Ah yea, this is unfortunately happening due to some missing Meta Data inside the latest Altair Camera DLL. The DLL isn’t properly installed when updating the application.

Can you instead uninstall nina and reinstall the version again? The file should then be there and be able to be loaded properly.

[Ralph]

Jap, with that it works

[Stefan B]

Issue reported as resolved